Dr. Louis Jay Riceberg

Dr Louis Jay Riceberg passed away on July 20, 2024 at age 77 in San Diego, California after a nearly five year battle with pancreatic cancer. He was born to Paul and Zelda (Glick) Riceberg in 1946 and raised in Medford MA.  Louis graduated from high school in 1964, then earned undergraduate (1968) and doctorate (1978) degrees in Biochemistry from Brandeis University. With this expertise he next spent many years developing and commercializing critical medical diagnostic tools, employed successively by Corning Diagnostics, Ciba Corning, Chiron, then Bayer. This career brought him and his young family to Tokyo, Japan for four years after which they returned to the US and resided in Medfield, MA. He later moved to San Diego and co-founded the consulting firm BioBridge Strategies, where he served as principal for 15 years. Outside of work, he was renowned for his cooking (especially his spare-no-expense and spare-no-pot Chinese food extravaganzas) and in his free time enjoyed powering through the appassionata sonata on the piano, bike riding, playing racquet sports, woodworking and travel. If there was ever a man with a true “joie de vivre” it was he, his curiosity about the world and about those around him made his orbit a singular place.  His generosity, his humor, his boundless love of family and friends, his gift of connecting with people, and connecting dots, will all be greatly missed.   

He is survived by his wife, Dr Freda Vaughan, daughter Jessica Riceberg, son Dr Justin Riceberg and his partner Dr Ioana Carcea, grandson Loumi Riceberg, sister Beverly (Riceberg) de Winter and brother-in-law Roger de Winter, brother-and sister-in-law Dr Randy and Becky Vaughan, and nieces Gabrielle de Winter, Joanna Heathcoat and Jennifer Gibson.

Celebrations of Louis’s life will be observed as private events. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in his memory to the San Diego Center for the Blind https://www.sdcb.org/donate-form-to-help-visually-impaired