Teaching tomorrow's surgeons

In collaboration with the University of Vermont Health Network, the Department of Surgery strives to recruit and retain the best faculty members to train our medical students.  The Department provides surgical services and training at the University of Vermont Health Network and is proud to be an integral part of this high quality, cost efficient health care center.  Our mission is to provide excellent patient care, superb resident and medical student training, and to foster research and innovation.   

Faculty and student practice microsutures

Education

From the entering novice medical student to the most experienced practitioner, the educational contribution of our department significantly and positively impacts the quality of care throughout Vermont and the areas throughout the country where our graduates practice. The major focus of our educational programs lies in Medical Student Education, Resident Education, Continuing Medical Education and Skills Labs.

Physicians in the skull base lab

Research

A broad spectrum of activities are directed toward improving the quality of our patient care and toward developing novel, innovative therapies. Through investigator-initiated trials, as well as national cooperative group, and industry-funded trials, department faculty are able to offer our patients access to cutting-edge treatments not otherwise available.

Department Highlights

Brian Sprague, PhD, Division of Surgical Research, was awarded a Health Services Research Pilot Grant from the Larner College of Medicine, for his proposal, “Evaluation of a cancer risk assessment questionnaire to guide cancer screening decision-making in primary care.”

Bruce Leavitt, MD (Cardiothoracic Surgery) and a team of 10 from UVM, are part of Team Heart, a nonprofit focused on bringing cardiac care to people in Rwanda.  Watch the WCAX segment. 

Departmental News

Summer Student Research Program Trains Next Generation of Cancer Scientists

January 26, 2022 by Katherine Strotmeyer

The UVM Cancer Center Summer Student Fellowships in Cancer Research provide $3,000 stipends to graduate and medical students for cancer-related research projects, overseen by senior faculty members affiliated with the center.

Larner College of Medicine medical student Joaquin Reategui '24. (Courtesy photo)

Last summer, when second-year medical student Joaquin Reategui was looking for a research project to complement and deepen his studies, options in the Covid-circumscribed world around him weren’t abundant.

Then a program highlighted in a Larner College of Medicine newsletter caught his eye.

The UVM Cancer Center Summer Student Fellowships in Cancer Research, Reategui read, provided $3,000 stipends to graduate and medical students for cancer-related research projects, overseen by senior faculty members affiliated with the center.

He promptly applied, was accepted, and spent the summer analyzing the effectiveness of youth anti-vaping campaigns, working with his mentor, Andrea Villanti, Ph.D., a former UVM associate professor of psychiatry whose research focuses on how young adults’ beliefs about nicotine influence their perceptions of tobacco product addictiveness and harm.

Training medical and graduate students—and eventually undergraduate students—to do cancer research is a key goal of the fellowship program. Doctors often make good researchers, says Randall Holcombe, M.D., M.B.A., the cancer center’s director, who is a physician with an active research portfolio.

“Since physicians have a lot of patient care experience, they have a keen perspective on how research will impact patient health,” he says.

The program has offered students a broad spectrum of cancer research opportunities in disciplines arranging from surgery, pharmacology, and radiation oncology to biochemistry, pathology, and psychiatry. Reategui’s vaping project—which required him to master a data analysis program called Stata and bring meaning to a mass of data points in the youth surveys— sparked an interest in incorporating research into his career.

“I’m interested in the pediatric population, and I’ve been looking into oncology as one of the main paths to investigate with that population,” he says.

In addition to Reategui, the other UVM Cancer Center Summer 2021 research awardees are: Alqassem Abuarqoub, Cellular, Molecular and Biomedical Sciences (CMB) graduate student (mentor: James Stafford, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurological sciences); Rachel Bombardier, Class of 2024 medical student (mentor: David Krag, M.D., S.D. Ireland Professor in Surgical Oncology); Amy Chang, Class of 2024 medical student (mentor: Alissa Thomas, M.D., associate professor of neurological sciences); Trevor Coles, Class of 2024 medical student (mentor: Gary Stein, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry); Linda Cui, Class of 2024 medical student (mentor: Nataniel Lester-Coll, M.D., assistant professor of radiology); Sean Lenahan, CMB graduate student (mentor: David Seward, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine); Kiera Malone, CMB graduate student (mentor: Karen Glass, Ph.D., associate professor of pharmacology); Mikaela Mohardt, Class of 2024 medical student (mentor: Brian Sprague, Ph.D., associate professor of surgery); Allison Morrissey, CMB graduate student (mentor: Andrea Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics); Kayla Sohl, graduate student in pharmacology (mentor: Frances Carr, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology); and Joshua Victor, CMB graduate student (mentor: Nimrat Chatterjee, Ph.D.,  assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics).

Upcoming Events

Surgery Grand Rounds is held every Thursday during the academic year (September - June) in the Davis Auditorium from 7:30-8:30 am followed by M&M Conference from 8:30-9:30 am.

Visit the detailed department calendar >>