| Spencer grew up in a small rural town as the son of an elementary school principal and a public school teacher. He and his wife Julia have been married for 15 years and have made their home in Tippecanoe County where they are raising three school-aged children.
Spencer has worked at Purdue University since 2011 and currently serves as Deputy Chief of Staff and as a communications and public policy advisor to former Indiana governor and current Purdue President Mitch Daniels.
One of Spencer's primary duties at Purdue is to use data to help university administrators effectively communicate and lead. During the early days of the pandemic and in consultation with subject matter experts, Spencer assembled the data points that President Daniels would use to make the public case that it would be safe to bring students back to campus. Spencer also played a major role in the creation of Purdue University Global, a new online Indiana public university that is designed to allow Hoosiers and others to finish degrees at Purdue that they started elsewhere.
As a believer in free enterprise, Spencer collaborated with likeminded economics faculty in 2013 to develop a public policy research center at Purdue with a mission to study how laws, regulations and government programs affect the market economy and the well-being of individuals and society.
Before Purdue, Spencer worked as a communications and public policy research aide in the U.S. Department of Veterans affairs in Washington DC. Among his responsibilities was an assignment to meet with foreign embassy leaders from around the world to learn the different ways countries care for veterans in a search for best practices that could be adopted in the United States. Before the VA, Spencer worked in the private sector in marketing and strategic communications.
Spencer has a bachelor's degree in public relations with minors in both business and political science and a master's degree from the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University. Although he graduated at the top of the class in graduate school, the most important thing he learned was that Indiana was where he wanted to make his home, and it is in the states and local government, not Washington, where the best governance is possible.
Spencer has never pursued political office until now, but he has had a career that prepared him to succeed as an effective legislator and advocate for Hoosiers across District 23.
Spencer's involvement in the local community includes coaching youth recreation basketball, which he has done since 2017. He also has been a leader in his local church congregation and since 2019, he has served on the Board of Trustees of the Arbor Chase Home Owners Association, a responsibility he accepted only after deciding the volunteer position was the best way to keep the organization from impeding on property rights in the neighborhood.
Spencer is a true believer in the American experiment and an adherent to genuine, constitutional conservatism and personal liberty. He has been a Republican his entire life, and has served as a delegate to the state GOP convention. |