Earning multiple academic degrees wasn’t a long-held ambition for Dr. Spencer Price. In fact, he didn’t think much about college when he was growing up.
But higher education became the means for him to transcend his background, and his curiosity and love of learning led him to not just one but six degrees, five of them from Mercer University. Currently, he is the only five-time Bear, according to existing University records and excluding graduates with dual degrees.
“I’m probably the least likely person that you would ever meet who would end up going to college and beyond,” said Dr. Price, an emergency medicine physician. “Education was a means to rise against the circumstances to which I was born. That was my ticket out. I didn’t realize that until significantly after high school. Once I got started, I pursued education with vigor.”
Dr. Price grew up on a farm in Thomaston. Neither of his parents finished high school, but he broke that cycle and even graduated a year early.
However, it took a few more years for college to enter his mind as a real possibility. After a conversation with a friend, he met with the director of a satellite center that Mercer operated in Thomaston. At nearly 22 years old, Dr. Price began evening business classes while working full-time as a newspaper reporter during the day.
“I’ve always been someone who was curious, and I enjoyed learning,” said Dr. Price, who lives in Valdosta with his wife, Erin, and their three children. “Learning was a hobby of mine and my entertainment. I found myself interested in a myriad of subjects.”
After completing his Bachelor of Business Administration in 1989, he immediately moved to Macon. He began working on a biology degree at Mercer that he hoped would lead him to medical school, a goal inspired by his upbringing.
As a child, caretaking was a part of his daily life. Dr. Price’s grandmother had a stroke when he was 3 years old, and she required skilled care in a nursing home for the rest of her life. So, Dr. Price grew up going with his mother to the nursing home to take care of his grandmother.
“Mercer’s primary goal is to produce primary care trained physicians to serve in rural and medically underserved areas, and I grew up in a small town,” Dr. Price said. “So, Mercer’s philosophy of producing physicians to work in those settings was natural to me as well, because I wanted to stay in a more rural setting.”
Dr. Price earned his biology degree in 1993 and his medical degree at Mercer School of Medicine in 1997, working mostly full-time all the while. He completed an internal medicine residency at Macon’s hospital, and since then, he has accumulated an impressive resume as an emergency medicine doctor at facilities across Georgia and as a military physician with the Army National Guard. He is board certified in emergency medicine, internal medicine, disaster medicine and administrative medicine.
“It’s just a basic desire to help restore people’s health and to improve their life through improving their health,” Dr. Price said of the driving forces for his career. “A lot of people are driven to emergency medicine because they like the adrenaline rush, but I’m not like that. It’s always interesting; it’s always something new coming every day.”
Currently, Dr. Price is a staff physician at Smith Northview Hospital in Valdosta and is an operational medicine officer with the 20th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. A 32-year veteran, he completed combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also served as a military flight surgeon for NASA’s Space Shuttle program from 2006-2010, providing medical support to astronauts before and after their launches.
“I am a patriot, through and through,” Dr. Price said. “I’ve often told people that the Army was my first love. My father was a World War II veteran who served in the South Pacific, and I was always proud of his service. The National Guard was my opportunity to have a civilian and military career at the same time.”
During his career, Dr. Price also took two semesters of law school courses and earned a Master of Business Administration in 2010 and a Master of Public Health in 2018, all at Mercer. Dr. Price has applied his MBA knowledge to his two beef cattle farms and his real estate investments. He also completed a Master of Professional Studies in Homeland Security — Agricultural Biosecurity at Penn State University in 2024.
Outside his medical work, Dr. Price has carried on his passion for writing. He has written numerous articles and columns for newspapers and magazines and published the book Defending the Faith in 2011. Driven by his ongoing interest in law, he is co-developing an app to help divorced families navigate visitation issues and legal orders.
“I’ve done something with every one of my degrees. I’ve used my degrees in all aspects of my life,” he said. “I encourage all students who are considering academic endeavors to pursue their education with dedication and devotion and with a goal (of) making their own lives, the lives of their family and that of society in general better.”
