End Of An Era At UConn's Health Emergency Room

STORRS, CT — After three decades UConn Health — including the last decade as the chairman of emergency medicine — Dr. Robert Fuller has retired.

Fuller arrived at UConn Health in 1996, Back then, the emergency department was a division of the Department of Surgery. It would become the Department of Traumatology and Emergency Medicine, under the leadership of Dr. Lenworth Jacobs, a trauma surgeon at Hartford Hospital and member of the UConn School of Medicine faculty.

In 2015, Dr. Bruce Liang, then the medical school dean, appointed Fuller as Jacobs’ successor, and they created a separate emergency department to "further align UConn Health with the rest of the national academic community."

By 2016, the continuing expansion of the John Dempsey Hospital Emergency Department culminated with the opening of the University Tower, which included a modern, multi-zoned, 40-bed "emergency room."

Fuller said he intends to continue seeing patients in that ED on occasional weekends for the foreseeable future, and remains available as a mentor to his clinical and academic successors in UConn Health emergency medicine.

He also plans to continue volunteering with the International Medical Corps, which deploys physicians to disasters around the world.

See more on Fuller's career on the UConn Today website.