Richard M. Heller Jr., MD, professor emeritus of Radiology and Radiological Sciences, who in 1975 became Vanderbilt’s first chief of Pediatric Radiology, died Feb. 3. He was 86.
Dr. Heller was a Chicago native who graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1959 and earned his MD from Northwestern University in 1963. He did his postgraduate work at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, and he was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins before coming to Vanderbilt in 1975.
In addition to serving as chief of Pediatric Radiology, Dr. Heller was director of the Radiology residency program for 20 years and was the author of hundreds of research papers and several books in his career.
Alongside his clinical, teaching, administrative and research work, Dr. Heller was a person of many other interests.
A time spent in Denmark as a young man left a lifelong impression on him, and beginning in 1981 he served as the honorary Danish consul for Tennessee, a position he held for more than 30 years. For his service, he was honored by Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II as a Knight 1st Class, Order of the Dannebrog.
Dr. Heller also served for a time as a radiologist for the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., where he completed imaging studies on zoo animals, observing once that “It’s very challenging and tremendously interesting to try and extrapolate what we know from the radiology of human illness to exotic animal illness.”
In 2007 he was elected to the Explorers Club, the New York-based organization founded in 1904 that had as its honorary chairman Sir Edmund Hillary and described itself as “a meeting point and unifying force for explorers worldwide.”
Among the many professional honors he achieved were the Distinguished Service Award from the American Board of Radiology; the Lifetime Achievement Award for Teaching in Pediatrics from the Department of Pediatrics; and a named lectureship in the Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences.
Dr. Heller is survived by his wife of 53 years, Toni, his children, Richard (Beth) and Jaime (Mark Kocourek), and four grandchildren.
A funeral service will be held at 11:30 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 6, at Congregation Micah.
