Welcome to the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine SURF program!
As directors of this program, it is our job to connect you with research mentors from our world-class faculty for a highly personalized research experience that matches your interests and strengths. You will also benefit from group activities with your fellow SURFers, including career development sessions and research symposium presentations.
Our goal is to help SURFers develop into intellectual leaders in the biomedical and health fields through rigorous exposure to cutting-edge wet-bench and computational techniques as well as research best practices and oral/written presentation skills. Our former SURFers are already making a mark for themselves, co-authoring articles in highly impactful scientific journals and furthering their training in our Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences and our T32-funded MD/Ph.D. programs.
We both have benefited from opportunities that came our ways as trainees to conduct innovative, multidisciplinary, and exciting scientific research and to interact with stellar scientific mentors. Without these experiences, we would not be in the careers we enjoy today. Therefore, we are both incredibly honored to have been entrusted with facilitating Sylvester’s and UMMSOM’s mission of training the next generation of biomedical researchers through our SURF program.
Since 2018, SURF has expanded substantially in number and has welcomed students from all over the country in addition to South Florida undergraduates. Many of our program alumni have returned to our post-baccalaureate Ph.D., MD/Ph.D., MPH, and Masters degree-granting programs, based on their positive SURF experiences.
We are especially pleased that in 2021 SURF received NIH/NCI funding to expand our numbers and programmatic scope. Thanks in large part to support from this source, our SURFers receive training modules on computational biology and bioinformatics, as well as on public health equity and disparities research. At the end of our ten-week program, our SURFers will have undergone a comprehensive training program that includes mentored bench research, academic/professional development sessions, as well as experiential knowledge in the above cutting-edge areas of biomedical research. If you are interested in our SURF program, please reach out to our SURF (surf@miami.edu).
Priyamvada Rai, Ph.D.
Professor, Radiation Oncology
Director, Medical School SURF program and Principal Investigator, NCI R25 CREATE
Co-leader, Tumor Biology Program, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center
Faculty Mentor, Cancer Biology and Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology Graduate Programs
Claude Volmar, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Assistant Director, Medical School SURF program
Director, Research Laboratory, Center for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI)
Assistant Director, Molecular Therapeutics Shared Resource (MTSR)
Member, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center