Right off the bat, 16-year-old Matthew McDermott knew where he wanted to do a science internship. “I was very interested in Roswell Park, because of the history my family has here,” says Matthew, a junior at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute (SJCI) in Buffalo.

His personal history with RPCI began even before he was born. His mother, Mary Rose McDermott, Annual Fund Manager for the Roswell Park Alliance Foundation, was four months pregnant with Matthew in the fall of 1994 when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her doctor, Michael Caligiuri, MD*, assured her that the medical team “felt very comfortable giving me chemo,” Ms. McDermott recalls. “They felt the molecules in the drugs were too large to pass through the placenta.” So she went ahead with the chemotherapy and later delivered a healthy boy with thick blond hair—a sign that reassured her that the baby had been unaffected by her treatments. “He has pretty much been your average child, health-wise and everything else,” says Ms. McDermott.

Four years after Matthew was born, Ms. McDermott relapsed and re-entered treatment, so she and her husband, RPCI Decision Support Analyst Kevin McDermott, explained to their son as much as they thought he could absorb. Over the years, Matthew accompanied his mother to medical appointments and volunteered at the annual Ride for Roswell fundraiser. With every one of those experiences, he became more familiar with RPCI and its mission.

More recently, a growing interest in science led him back to the Institute and the internship he had hoped for. He spent the summer of 2011 working in the Clinical Cytogenetics Lab, transporting and archiving biological samples. The experience has given him a better sense of what lab work is like.  “I definitely enjoyed it,” he says, “and I can see myself doing this.” He hopes to attend Stanford, Harvard, or Duke University.

Watching her son at work in the lab, Mary Rose has “a very odd feeling, almost as if things have come full circle in some way. He’s going to make a difference in somebody’s life.

“It’s a nice feeling, knowing we have come so far together.”

*Like Matthew McDermott, Dr. Caligiuri attended SJCI. He also participated in RPCI’s Summer Research Program as a high school student. Today he is CEO of the James Cancer Center and Solove Research Institute at The Ohio State University.