On Sept. 3, the Beckman Institute atrium filled with overlapping conversations as Illinois undergraduates presented research from their summer at Mayo Clinic. Representing the College of Applied Health Sciences, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Gies College of Business, and The Grainger College of Engineering, the students spoke with attendees about their summer research experiences.
With support from the Mayo Clinic & Illinois Alliance for Technology-Based Healthcare (Alliance), 18 Illinois students participated in three 10-week Mayo Clinic summer programs focused on biomedical research, health equity, and clinical investigation. Working alongside Mayo Clinic researchers and clinical teams in Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota, the students gained firsthand experience with the collaborative nature and day-to-day pace of research within a major medical center. The poster session brought together Illinois participants from the three programs and bioengineering student Ananya Nayak, who completed a separate neuroscience internship at Mayo Clinic. As the students presented their findings, they shared how patient experiences, clinical perspectives, and unexpected variables and research results had shaped their work at Mayo Clinic.
Five weeks into his summer research experience at Mayo Clinic, Mark Dai had not found evidence supporting the hypothesis guiding his initial project. Dai, an Illinois neural engineering major, was using a recently published mathematical model to separate signal from noise in intracranial human electrophysiological data.
Dai was one of 12 Illinois students in Mayo Clinic’s 2026 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), which brought together nearly 200 undergraduates from across the country. SURF introduces students to careers in biomedical research by placing them in Mayo Clinic laboratories and translational science teams investigating areas such as immunology, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, and physiology.
As the summer continued, Dai tried multiple computational methods while reevaluating his analysis. After discussing the results with his mentors, he pivoted to studying social perception in the human lateral visual stream and began observing promising results later that week. Dai presented findings from the new research direction during the poster session.
Dora Hermes Miller, Dai’s primary mentor and a Mayo Clinic associate professor of biomedical engineering, saw the challenge as an important part of his development as a scientist.
“Mark has the persistence to develop as a scientist,” Hermes Miller said. “He learned that understanding novel research results where the outcome is unknown can be extremely challenging and that a good hypothesis and research question are necessary to focus the work and make progress.”
For Ashwitha (Ash) Sankar, the stakes of her research came into focus through the experience of a patient. Sankar, a student in interdisciplinary health sciences and molecular and cellular biology, examined how to make extreme heat warnings clear and actionable for Spanish-speaking communities.
Sankar was one of three Illinois students who participated in the Health Equity Research Experience (HERE), a program supported by the Alliance and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) at Illinois, that engages Illinois undergraduates in health equity research at Mayo Clinic in Florida. HERE introduces students to careers in healthcare and clinical research as they examine how environmental, economic, and social conditions shape health outcomes.
While working with a local medical society to prepare a letter to the editor about the effects of extreme heat on vulnerable populations, Sankar spoke with an emergency medicine resident who had treated a patient with liver failure from exposure to extreme heat. The patient had avoided using air conditioning because he feared high electricity bills.
“This underscored for me that extreme heat is a profound public health and equity crisis where economic barriers can literally prove fatal,” Sankar explained.
Dr. Kim M. Barbel Johnson, Sankar’s mentor and a Mayo Clinic family medicine physician and principal research investigator, watched Sankar connect individual patient experiences with the systems and policies shaping environmental health.
“Mentoring Ash reminded me of one of the best parts of academic medicine. Occasionally, you meet a student whose future you become genuinely excited to follow,” Barbel Johnson said. “Ash is one of those students for me.”
Unexpected findings led Adeline Gilmore to see the value of her research differently. Gilmore, an interdisciplinary health sciences major with a concentration in health behavior change, examined the relationship between socioeconomic status and blood clot risk among trauma patients.
Gilmore was one of three Illinois students who participated in the Clinical Research Internship Study Program (CRISP) at Mayo Clinic. CRISP places college students with faculty mentors to work on clinical research projects, develop research methodology skills, and explore careers in medicine, healthcare, and science.
Throughout the summer, Gilmore organized and collected clinical data for her team’s database and studied existing research in the field. When the project produced unexpected results, preparing the poster gave her a different way to understand them.
“Presenting my lab’s hard work made me realize how much we learned and taught me that unexpected results do not make research less meaningful,” Gilmore said. “Rather, they lead to new questions that make the work even more exciting.”
Myung S. Park, Gilmore’s mentor and a Mayo Clinic professor of surgery, watched Gilmore develop a clearer understanding of the work required to complete clinical research and the challenges clinicians face in balancing research with patient care.
“I would love to have her back next summer if she would like to return to our laboratory to continue her work,” Park said.
Bioengineering major Sarah Guo was one of two 2025 Illinois SURF students who returned for a second summer in 2026. After studying reproductive immunology during her first summer, Guo joined a different laboratory to investigate immune development in early life, broadening her perspective within the field while building on skills she had already developed.
“I was surprised by how much more comfortable I felt adapting to a new area of research compared with my first summer at Mayo Clinic,” Guo said. “Even when I was unfamiliar with a topic or technique, I felt more confident asking questions or picking up on new information within the literature.”
Bryan White, Illinois Professor Emeritus of Animal Sciences and former Illinois Director of the Alliance, helped build the partnership during its early years by connecting researchers and clinicians across the two institutions. At the poster session, he saw how those early connections expanded opportunities for Illinois students.
“It was amazing to see how this has grown from one Illinois student in 2010 to 18 in the 2026 cohort,” White said. “The number and breadth of their projects demonstrate what two world-class institutions can achieve together. They can inspire students from diverse fields to address questions that advance precision and personalized medicine and train the next generation of healthcare researchers. Both institutions benefit, but the Illinois students who make research at Mayo Clinic part of their academic journeys are the greatest beneficiaries.”
Illinois is accepting applications for 2027 SURF preselection through Nov. 1. The CRISP application opens Nov. 1 and closes Jan. 31, while the HERE application opens Dec. 1 and closes Jan. 25. A recording of the recent information session provides an overview of all three programs. Subscribe to the Alliance mailing list to receive application details and announcements.