Mary I. O'Connor
Mary I. O’Connor (born circa 1959) is a 1980 U.S. Olympic team rower and an orthopedic surgeon, researcher, and professor with the Mayo Clinic and Yale School of Medicine. She was also a member of the 1976 Yale women's rowing team that protested inequalities, starting the Title IX movement to fight sexual discrimination in college athletics. Early life. O’Connor was born and raised in New Castle, Pennsylvania. She attended Yale University where she was a member of St. Anthony Hall and the women's rowing team. She graduated from Yale in 1979 with a degree in  biochemistry. She then attended the Medical College of Pennsylvania (now Drexel University College of Medicine). Rowing. O'Connor did not participate in sports in high school because there were no teams for girls. In college, she began rowing—a sport that had just started for women at Yale in 1972. This was early in the history of women at Yale, and female athletes were being treated more like an intermural team that a varsity sport. In March 1976, the women's rowing team made national news when they protested the inequality. Tired of issues such as not having showers by the  water—and having to wait in the bus while the men's team took showers—the women wrote TITLE IX on each other "in Yale blue marker" and went to the director of women's athletics' office where they stripped before reading their protest statement. O'Connor says, "What I'm most proud of is that we showed people the backbone of Title IX. We told Yale that this treatment of women was not acceptable to us...or to the women who would follow us." Once, the story hit "The New York Times" and national news, the women's rowing team  got their shower facility. A year later, a short documentary film, "A Hero for Daisy," was made about their protest. ESPN executive editor Steve Wulf says, "If you were to think of Title IX as a river, with a source, tributaries and a mouth, this is the point where the rapids began." The Yale's women's rowing team went on to win the Eastern Sprints in 1977 and 1979, and the National Championship in 1979. Aspiring for the Olympics, O'Connor went to the U.S.A. team selections in 1978, but did not make the cut. However, in 1979 she was  a member of Yale's varsity National Championship team. In1979, she returned to the U.S.A. team selections and made the women's eight team and began competing and training for the 1980 Olympics. In the pre-Olympic races in Europe, this team set the world's record and won a Bronze medal. However, O'Connor did not get to participate in the 1980 Summer Olympics because the United States boycotted the games that year. O'Connor says, "We felt used and that we were just political pawns." Career. O'Connor was a resident in orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine  and Science in Rochester, Minnesota in 1985. She also was a fellow in orthopedic oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. She then became a professor of orthopedics and rehabilitation at the Yale School of Medicine. In 1991, O'Connor became a professor of orthopedics at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, becoming chair of the department of orthopedic surgery in 2005. There, she operated on bone and soft tissue tumors, and also performed knee and hip replacements. Her focus areas were knee osteoarthritis, knee replacement surgery, limb salvage surgery, and health care process improvement. She also researched the differences between how  women and men feel knee arthritis and the impact of stem cell injections on knee arthritis. Her research has been published in "Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research", the "Journal of Arthroplasty", and "The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery". From 2006 to 2010, she was a member of the Advisory Committee on Research on Women's Health for the National Institutes of Health. She is a former president of the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons, the Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons, the International Society of Limb Salvage, the Ruth Jackson Orthopaedic Society, and the Musculoskeletal Tumor Society  of which she was also the first female member. In 2010, she became co-chair and later chair of the Movement is Life Caucus, a coalition that works on the musculoskeletal health disparities among women and minorities. In 2015, O'Connor became the first director of the Center for Musculoskeletal Care at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale New Haven Health System. In February 2021, she co-founded and became the chief medical officer of Vori Health, a musculoskeletal medical startup. She is also a professor emerita of orthopedic surgery with the Mayo Clinic. Personal. She is married and has  two daughters and a son who all row.