Shane O’Donnell's Harvard trip a gut check to Clare's 2019 plans

Shane O’Donnell will miss most, if not all, of Clare’s 2019 Allianz Hurling League Division 1A campaign after he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the prestigious Harvard University.

The UCC Quercus Sports Scholar, who graduated with a bachelor of science degree in Genetics from the university in October 2016 and is currently studying a PhD there, heads to Cambridge, Massachusetts in September and returns in the spring of next year. The Fulbright Program, Ireland-United States Commission for Educational Exchange, provides for Irish citizens to lecture, research or study in the US and for American citizens to do the same in Ireland. Set up in Ireland in 1957 but established by US senator J. William Fulbright in 1946, 8,000 international awards are given out annually.

In an interview with the Irish Examiner last year, the 24-year-old gave a summation of his PhD topic: “It’s food science which is the broad subject. Genetics plays a part — it plays a part in everything, after all. I’m working on these specific sugars, different carbohydrates — you’d know some of them, sucrose, lactose that would be in milk. There are 11 of them and bacteria break them down and they react in people’s guts.”