On May 1, 2006, Dr. Stephen Prescott was named president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF). Prescott was the fifth full-time, salaried president in the history of OMRF, which celebrated its 60th birthday in 2006. He succeeded J. Donald Capra, M.D., who retired after leading the foundation since 1997.

Prescott, 58, arrived at the OMRF from the University of Utah, where he was a professor of internal medicine and helds the H.A. & Edna Benning Presidential Endowed Chair. An internationally recognized leader in the studies of the basic mechanisms of human disease, he founded the Eccles Program in Human and Molecular Biology and Genetics at the university and, was the executive director of the university’s Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Prescott, who led OMRF from 2006 until his death in 2021, took particular care when it came to recruiting OMRF’s principal investigators, the scientists who run each of OMRF’s 50-plus labs. He’d interview every candidate personally, which is far from typical for the president of a research institute.