LHS Hall of Fame Inductee – Mike O’Fallon

Four Litchfield High School graduates will be inducted into the Litchfield High School Hall of Fame this Friday evening – prior to the Indoor Marching Band concert, which begins at 7 p.m. This year’s group includes the late William Michael O’Fallon from the class of 1952, Marcia Curtis Provencher from the class of 1966, Jon Lovald from the class of 1988, and Adam Stern from the class of 2001.

Mike O’Fallon was involved in speech, theater, band, track, cross-country, football, baseball, wrestling and honor society while he was at Litchfield High School. After graduating in 1952, he attended St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN for 4 years – with a major in mathematics and a minor English, and was involved in theater, track, cross-country and wrestling.

O’Fallon had planned on being a high school math teacher and coach, but was offered a 12-month DuPont fellowship by the Vanderbilt University Mathematics Department. With a masters in mathematics, he was then offered a job teaching at his alma mater – St. John’s – in 1957. He then pursued his doctorate – enrolling at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1960 as he was offered a 3-year National Defense Education Fellowship. He also received a 2-year Research Associate appointment in UNC’s Biostatistics Department and completed his PhD in Mathematical Statistics in 1967.

In 1965, while writing his PhD dissertation, Duke University recruited him and he taught there for 9 years. As an associate professor, he studied epidemiology during a sabbatical and explored research projects at Mayo Clinic. He then applied for a one-year fellowship with the National Cancer Institute to study breast cancer and moved his family to Rochester in 1974, and spent 19 years as a professor in the Mayo Medical School. In 1994, he was appointed to chair Mayo’s Dept. of Health Sciences Research, and retired from Mayo in 2002. O’Fallon passed away in Rochester in 2022.