Professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Pathology
Director, Division of Reproductive Endocrinology
Reproductive Medicine
Poetry
Narrative in Medicine
Medical Education
Office Phone: (631) 444-2731
E-mail:Richard.Bronson@stonybrook.edu
Richard Bronson was born on February 22, 1941, in New York City. It was the year of the attack on Pearl Harbor. His father, a newly trained physician, declared essential to the community, did not have to go to war and built a large general medical practice in the Bronx. Although rarely home, he was a distant but powerful force in Bronson’s childhood.
Bronson wrote poetry in high school, but his interest withered during his later education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and New York University School of Medicine. After internship at Bellevue Hospital, residency in Obstetrics & Gynecology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology at Pennsylvania Hospital, he continued to write, but these were scientific manuscripts.
His research interests in the laboratory have centered on understanding why fertilization might fail, which complemented his clinical activities. He has been active in the American Society of Reproductive Immunology, becoming a past President, and served on its Council. Bronson has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Reproductive Immunology, Journal of Andrology, Fertility & Sterility, and The Pharos. He has been an Associate Editor of Human Reproduction and of Reproduction, a Section Editor of Reproductive Biology & Medicine Online (RBMO) and the Editor-in-Chief of the textbook Reproductive Immunology. Bronson is the recipient of the Leonard Tow 2015 Humanism in Medicine Award of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation.
Dr. Bronson joined the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in 1988. While participating in the Medicine in Contemporary Society course that year, he was exposed once again to poetry, and his dormant interest reawakened. He has been fortunate to live in a vibrant community of poets on Long Island, who nurtured his own development as a poet. Bronson is currently on the Board of Trustees of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, as well as the Board of the Long Island Poetry Collective and facilitates its weekly workshop in the Huntington Library. He has won the 2003 poetry prize of the American College of Physicians and the Institute for Medicine in Contemporary Society prize for poetry in 2005. His first collection of poems, Search for Oz, was published in 2006, followed by Silent Music (2009), Passage (2014), Wearing Masks (2015), and Imperfect Knowledge (2021). In 2006, Bronson founded Padishah Press, a small press devoted to the publication of poetry informed by the medical experience. His work has appeared in The Pharos, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, Western Journal of Medicine, Medical Journal of Australia, JAMA, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, BMJ Medical Humanities, Family Medicine, as well as Long Island Quarterly, Suffolk County Poetry Review, Long Island Sounds, Performance Poets Literary Annual. Bronson was nominated Poet Laureate of Suffolk County in June 2021.