ANNAPOLIS, Md. — United States Naval Academy men’s water polo student-athlete Sean O’Boyle (Jr., Steilacoom, Wash./Curtis Senior) recently completed an internship at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.
He surrendered a month of leave to participate in OMRF’s John H. Saxon Service Academy Summer Research Program, which compresses an intensive summer internship into a month. John Saxon III, M.D., a Muskogee physician and OMRF board member since 2000, established the program in 2009 to honor his father, a West Point graduate who taught at the United States Air Force Academy and was a career Air Force pilot.
“You’re not going to find any more dynamic people than the cadets in our service academies,” Saxon said. “My father told me that being a West Point graduate opened doors for him from then on, and I tell these students the same holds true about OMRF. Even if you’re here for a short time, having that after your name means something.
O’Boyle and fellow Naval Academy Midshipmen Timmy Wright worked in the lab of OMRF scientist Roberto Pezza, Ph.D., who’s trying to determine the cause of cell-division errors that lead to infertility, miscarriages and certain birth defects. The pair tracked chromosomes in real time to better understand what happens when the process of cell division goes wrong.
With little hands-on lab experience, the midshipmen were struck by the culture of mentorship among their lab colleagues, likening it to life at the academy.
“We’re just undergraduates, and they passed on all this knowledge to help train and teach the people below. That’s just like at the Naval Academy,” said O’Boyle.
O’Boyle, an applied physics major, plans to become a physician or a researcher following his time in Annapolis.
Although his time at OMRF was brief, O’Boyle knows it will stay with him.
“There are incredible people here doing incredible things,” noted O’Boyle. “They’re doing cutting-edge research that’s going to help people live happier, healthier lives.”
Information courtesy Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
