NIH Oxford Cambridge Scholars Program

"We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity."

Marie Curie

Discoveries & Publications

The program strongly emphasizes the importance of innovation and offers students a degree of intellectual freedom not generally found in didactic academic environments. Mentors accept students knowing that the student may choose to investigate ideas outside of the mentor’s own specific area of expertise. This offers both the student and mentor unlimited opportunity to expand the scientific horizon in search of novel areas of inquiry often leading to exciting and expedited discoveries, examples of which appear below. Biomedical researchers are also judged by their ability to publish and present the outcomes of their work in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

	OXCAM Scholar Melody Duvall traveled beyond the US and the UK in search of opportunity to accelerate her AIDS research. Melody's quest took her to the Gambia, West Africa.
	A passion for pharmacology and genetics led Ogechi Ikediobi from Florida A & M University to study the relationship of gene mutations in cancer cell lines commonly studied for anticancer drug discovery.
	As an undergraduate and graduate student at Cambridge University, Jon Roiser became interested in how the serotonin system affected human behavior resulting in several interesting projects in neuropsychopharmacology.
	Paul Tesar, a Scholar from Case Western University, pursued a collaboration in pioneering studies of stem cells. Within the first two years of his graduate work, he published a sole author study on a new approach to deriving stem cells from mouse.
	Andy Johnson’s project has utilized the collaborative nature of the program to include a third location, the Australian National University in Canberra in addition to his NIH and Oxford University labs.
	Had Eric Freundt graduated from college and gone into a traditional biomedical research doctoral program, he would have begun his training by engaging in 1-2 years of coursework and rotations.