Fralin Life Science Institute

About the Program

The Fralin Center offers the Wilkins-Fralin Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships, or SURFs, during the summer. These fellowships support rising Virginia Tech sophomores, juniors and seniors to pursue life sciences research full-time during the summer, and high achieving life sciences majors are invited each spring to participate. Generally, six to twenty fellowships are awarded. Wilkins-Fralin fellows are mentored by a Virginia Tech professor in the life sciences.

Students are totally immersed in a project for ten weeks during the summer and presents the results to their peers and mentors at the end of the summer. Some past fellows have come away from the experience, not only with a better appreciation of what it is like to be a research
scientist, but also with one or more publications in peer reviewed journals

Applicants must identify a faculty sponsor with whom they intend to work, and student and sponsor prepare the application together. Twelve fellowships of $3300 are awarded, and awardees are expected to work full-time (40 hours per week) for 10 weeks over the summer.

For the summer of 2008, 12 Fralin SURFs were selected from a pool of 26 applicants in the areas of Cell and Developmental Biology, Molecular Plant Sciences, Microbiology and Infectious Disease, and Vector Borne Diseases. The Obesity and Nutrition group gave out their fellowships
separately during the academic year. The applications were reviewed by two faculty members each and were scored in a process much like an NIH F31/F32 review.

Several SURF students have been co-authors on peer-reviewed scientific publications or symposium abstracts.

1. Isaac Nardi worked in collaboration with William Silkworth, a graduate student in the Daniela Cimini lab. An abstract summarizing their results has been submitted for presentation at the next American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting, to be held in San Francisco,CA, December 13-17.
   • Mulitpolar Spindle Assembly as a Cause of Kenetochore Mis-Attachment and Chromosome Mis-Segregation in Colorectal Cancer Cells, W.T. Silkworth, I.K. Nardi, L.M. Scholl, and D. Cimini
2. Omotara Ogundeyi who was mentored in the Sharakhov lab presented a poster at the Virginia Tech Dean’s Forum on Infectious Diseases September 28-29, 2008.
   • Role of Chromosomal Inversions in Desiccation Resistant Malaria Mosquitoes, Omotara Ogundeyi, Maria Sharakhova, Donald Mullins, Igor Sharakhov.
3. Andrew Lucas is co-author on a peer-reviewed research article published in the August 2008 Molecular and Cellular Biology journal.
   • A Novel Heme-Regulatory Motif Mediates Heme-Dependent Degradation of the Circadian Factor Period 2

View Previous Research Fellows

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  2008 Research Fellows