Student experience

Mayo Clinic's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) gives you more than just work experience in a lab. As a SURF fellow, you will:

• Conduct your own small research project or work on part of an ongoing research investigation for 10 weeks
• Develop your technical skills
• Participate in a special weekly seminar series that introduces you to rapidly progressing research areas and career development activities
• Engage in special events organized by graduate programs or your labs
• Present your work at the Summer Research Poster Session
• Become part of the Mayo Clinic research community

Seminar series

Each week you will attend a seminar with the opportunity to hear from different faculty, staff, and current students on a variety of topics. These seminars are designed to allow our fellows to learn more about our Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, pathways for a PhD, and professional developmental opportunities.

Research poster session

Every year, students and mentors alike look forward to the end-of-the-summer research poster session. In preparation for the event, you’ll create a research poster showcasing your work and then have a chance to explain your research and findings, as well as celebrate your summer of research with your fellow SURF participants.

Research by past participants

Each summer brings a variety of research questions and projects. Here are a few examples students have worked on in recent past years: 

• Investigating a Novel Drug Combination Therapy using Endometrial Cancer Cell Lines in vitro
• Guiding and Monitoring the Differentiation of Encapsulated Stem Cells
• Deep learning noise quantification of patient CT images: training dataset generation and analysis
• Aging Effects on Skeletal Muscle Autophagy
• Identifying Potential Biomarkers in Diagnosing Patients with Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome: Utilizing the Mayo Clinic EDS Clinic
• Health disparities in pregnancy care and public insurance
• A Balancing Act: Combining Standard of Care Medications with T Cell Immunotherapy for Treatment of Multiple Myeloma
• The Sensitizing Effects of TRAF2 Deficiency on TNF- and IFNy-Induced Cancer Cell Death
• Utilizing Molecular Dynamics Simulations to Characterize Pathogenic and Benign KCNQ1 Variants Involved in Long-QT Syndrome
• Characterizing a Novel Risk Haplotype for 5-Fluorouracil Toxicity
• Effect of Bleomycin Induced Cellular Senescence on Brain Dysfunction 
• Preserving Isolated Mitochondria Vitality for Regenerative Applications
• Characterization of extracellular vesicles from iPSC-derived mesenchymal stem cells for regenerative medicine
• Developing a Single-Cycle Measles Vector for Gene Editing Sickle Cell Disease
• In vitro characterization of MC0-R Mengovirus as a novel vector for oncolytic