Randy Lippincott, MPAS, PA-C, has had one of the most unusual careers in the history of the PA profession. He has worked in operating rooms, flew in the Arctic, and climbed a mountain most people have only read about; each place gave him something the others could not.
Lippincott grew up on a farm in rural Nebraska and went to a one-room country school. He credits that school with teaching him that education is not something money buys; it is something you build through curiosity, discipline, and paying attention to the world around you. He is also honest about a harder source of the self-reliance people notice in him. Lippincott had an older brother who bullied him, and as a small kid he learned to become self-contained, observant, and good at solving problems quietly. What started out as self-protection eventually turned into a steady internal compass, and it served him well in medicine, in the backcountry, and in every high-stakes environment he later found himself.
After a year at Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1968 and 1969, Lippincott joined the Army and completed the Special Forces Combat Medic course during the Vietnam era. The training ran fifty-two weeks and ended in the canine surgical lab that trained a whole generation of military medics. At the lab, teams of five rotated through the roles of surgeon, assistant, anesthetist, and inside and outside circulators. This special training taught him to operate under pressure with no safety net, and those habits of preparation and composure stayed with him for five decades.
Lippincott’s path into the PA profession was not a straight line. After taking classes at the University of Nebraska in 1974 and picking up a real estate license the same year, he trained and was certified as an operating room technician at St. Mark’s Hospital in Salt Lake City from 1974 to 1975. His experience in the surgical suite started to feel like home and in 1975, he entered the MEDEX program at the University of Utah and was certified as a physician assistant in 1976. Lippincott spent the next three years in family practice in Spanish Fork, Utah.
Family practice taught Lippincott plenty, but it also told him what he actually wanted. He has always been drawn to mechanical systems and hands-on fixes, what he calls the “wrench and hammer mentality” having been raised on the farm. Orthopedics made sense to him because bones and joints behave in predictable, structural ways and often the problem can be directly fixed. To build a foundation to practice in orthopedics, Lippincott completed a postgraduate surgical residency at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx in 1979 and 1980.
Lippincott returned to Utah from 1981 to 1983, where he ran several tracks at once. He finished a Bachelor of Science in Health Science at the University of Utah as a full-time student, served as a PA with the 19th Special Forces Group of the Army National Guard, managed a radiology research project under Dr. Jim Nelson, and took surgical call for Dr. John Reem at St. Mark’s on digit replantation cases. He does not describe this time as his working four jobs; he explains it as one integrated life where each piece made the others stronger.
In 1983, Lippincott moved north to Fairbanks, Alaska, and joined the Tanana Valley Clinic as a PA in orthopedic surgery. Seven years later, he was let go due to staff reduction.
Once again, Lippincott pivoted his career. He had been flying planes since he was five and had his pilot’s license at sixteen. Lippincott now had a commercial pilot’s license, an instrument rating, and more than two decades of flying experience behind him. He left clinical practice altogether and flew commercially in the Alaskan bush from 1989 to 1993, logging 5,000 hours as an airline transport pilot (ATP). It was in an area where weather, terrain, and isolation do not forgive much, and where operations stopped at fifty below. Lippincott recalls it as, “The front seat to the best show on Earth.”
Lippincott said his flying leaned on exactly what Special Forces and medicine had already built in him: judgment, calm under pressure, and self-reliance. Making constant decisions on incomplete information also taught him to separate signal from noise and to make the go-or-no-go call early, which he considers just as important in a clinic as in a cockpit.
Lippincott returned to orthopedics at the Mayo Clinic in 1993, where he practiced adult reconstructive surgery for 17 years before retiring in 2009. After years of frontier medicine, where Lippincott’s team was whoever happened to be within radio range, the Mayo Clinic took some getting used to. Not autonomy, he says, but the slowing down enough to use all the expertise standing around him. In 2000, with an established career, Lippincott earned a master’s degree in physician assistant studies with an emphasis in orthopedic surgery through the University of Nebraska’s Distance Learning Objective program. He did not do it for the credentials; he did it to formalize what he had learned on the job.
In August 2026, fifty years after Lippincott finished the MEDEX program, the University of Utah welcomed him into the Half Century Society at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine. The Society honors physicians and PA alumni who are fifty years or more out from graduation. With induction into the Society, Lippincott’s career came back around to the program where it started.
Outside of medicine, Lippincott’s record is just as unusual. He has climbed Denali, ice-climbed, skied at sixty-six miles an hour, parachuted out of airplanes, scuba-dived, and sailed. In 2016, he received the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award which is the Federal Aviation Administration’s lifetime achievement award for 50 straight years of flying without an incident or accident. He does not chalk that up to heroics, but to thousands of small, nearly invisible habits, like respecting checklists, staying ahead of the aircraft, and never letting a routine flight turn into a careless one. Lippincott has also written a series of autobiographical books, hoping younger clinicians will see that a career can have chapters, detours, and reinventions and still add up to something that makes sense.
Lippincott personal motto is Non timebo mala, which means “I fear no evil.” It goes back to those Nebraska childhood years rather than to any single brave moment later on. He is quick to say that he is not claiming to be fearless. It is a refusal to let fear make his decisions. Ask him what leadership actually looks like outside a classroom and the answer is plain. In the OR, it is knowing the case cold and keeping the room steady. In a rural clinic it is showing up, knowing your limits, and asking for help early. In small places, he says, people do not follow your credentials; they follow your consistency.
Lippincott currently lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, with his wife Joyce.
Acknowledgments:
This biography was prepared by Randy D. Danielsen, PhD, PA-C Emeritus, DFAAPA, with the assistance of Randy Lippincott. It draws on his curriculum vitae and his April 2026 appearance in the DMSc Masterclass series at the Arizona School of Health Sciences, A.T. Still University. It was submitted to the Society in September 2026. The photographs are courtesy of Mr Lippincott.
When using information from this biography, please provide the proper citation as described within the PA History Society Terms of Use.
To request the use of the photographs that accompany this biography, please contact the PA History Society to request permission as some photographs might have restrictions on their use.
