U of A professor and Tucson tech driver Gary Munsinger dies at 86

No local services are planned.

Munsinger, 86, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and earned an MBA and Ph.D. in economics and marketing from the University of Arkansas before joining the UA in 1962.

He held various UA roles, including senior vice president for resources and vice president for planning and budget, and taught marketing as a professor from 1971 to 1984.

Munsinger was associate dean of what is now the Eller College of Management from 1967 to 1971 and acting dean from 1971 to 1972.

In 1987, Munsinger left the UA to become a founding director and CEO of Research Corporation Technologies, a technology business development and investment firm that now has assets worth around $500 million.

In 2005, he stepped down as CEO of RCT and became chairman of the board, a position he held until his resignation in May 2018.

In 2009, he endowed the Gary M. Munsinger Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Eller College.

A longtime member of the Tucson Airport Authority board, Munsinger served as chairman in 1991. He also served on the board of United Bank of Arizona and was active with economic development with local economic-development groups the Tucson 30 and Tucson Tomorrow.

Munsinger’s wife of 32 years, Alethea Caldwell Munsinger, said he would have liked to be remembered for his work raising the profile and capacity of the UA as a major research institution in the 1980s, working with then-UA President Henry Koffler.

“He really assisted Koffler in getting U of A to be better ranked among the research universities — his work at the university to advance its stature was a very big deal for Gary,” Caldwell Munsinger said.

Caldwell Munsinger said she met her future husband when he recruited her to head the new University Medical Center — now Banner University Medical Center — Tucson — in 1984, after he spearheaded a financial and lobbying effort to create UMC as a nonprofit, UA-affiliated corporation that could issue its own bonds.

And he will also be remembered for his work in creating Research Corporation Technologies, along with former UA President John P. Schaefer, in 1987, Caldwell Munsinger said.

RCT was a spinoff of New York-based Research Corporation for Science Advancement, a nonprofit foundation that has been funding scientific research since 1912.

“I think his ability to bring that kind of technology to market inventions to market to benefit the public or health, that was a big thing,” said Caldwell Munsinger, a longtime health-care executive who served as director of the Arizona Department of Health Services from 1991 to 1994.

“Finally, I think he’d be like to be remembered as a really, really great professor,” she said. “His ability to teach and mentor was just kind of legendary.”

One of his students was Jeff Jacob, chairman of Research Corporation Technologies whom Munsinger hired as a consultant to help launch RCT. Jacob left RCT in 2004 as senior vice president to found several biotech startups.

“He was a father figure to me, he mentored me,” said Jacob, who has a master’s degrees in engineering and technology and policy from MIT.

“Gary was the driving force behind RCT and its success, and John (Schaefer), I always mention them in the same breath as they were partners for a long time,” he said. “Gary was the day-to-day operations guy, he brought economic principals to us technologists.”

Schaefer served as UA president from 1971 to 1982 and was president and CEO of RCT from 1988 to 2004 and served on RCT’s board until retiring recently.

“Gary was very well politically connected, which is something we really needed to get the corporation started as a nonprofit, tax-paying entity,” Schaefer said. “He had an excellent grip on marketing and economics and was able to blend those two into strategies that worked.”

Retired attorney Andrew Federhar was the student Regent during Munsinger’s time at the UA and knew him as a mentor for more than 40 years.

“He has left an indelible mark both on the University of Arizona and the entire Tucson community. He will be sorely missed,” said Federhar, retired managing partner of Phoenix-based Spencer Fane LLP.