Marcy Speer was born in Indianapolis and was raised in Indiana and Illinois. She graduated from Indiana University and earned a master's degree in genetic counseling from Sarah Lawrence College. After obtaining her PhD from Duke University, she did her postdoctoral work at Columbia University under Jurg Ott. She returned to Duke in 1994 for her first faculty appointment, and she made Duke her academic home until her death.
As a genetic epidemiologist, a certified genetic counselor and a board-certified medical geneticist, Speer had unusually broad training. This ultimately led her to become director of the Duke Center for Human Genetics and a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Medical Genetics in the Department of Medicine at Duke University Medical Center. She also held joint appointments as a professor in both the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Duke. She was a valued and active member of the Duke faculty and the Duke Center for Human Genetics. She was a member of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Duke University, where her joint human genetics clinical and research experience proved invaluable, and she was a past member of the editorial board of the Journal of Genetic Counseling. She was also a current permanent member of the National Institutes of Health's Genetics of Health and Human Disease study section. Speer coauthored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in her career. Often sought after as a collaborator and consultant, she contributed to numerous research projects at Duke and beyond. Her reputation knew no borders.
