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Since 1988, the Department of Pharmacology and former Alcohol Research Center (ARC) have recruited three to six students from underrepresented populations to carry out research with our faculty over a ten-week period during the summer. The 2011 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Program for Underrepresented Populations was funded in part by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) and the Colorado Clinical Translational Science Institute (CCTSI). This program provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to conduct research; present their results; attend seminars; and interact with fellow students, lab members, and faculty. Training in cellular and molecular pharmacology, signal transduction, neuropharmacology, biochemistry, and molecular structure, as well as opportunities in the blossoming field of bioinformatics, is available. Specific questions being researched focus on many areas including cancer biology, cell biology, alcohol and drugs of abuse, learning and memory, genomics, proteomics, lipid maps, and structural biology. A variety of state-of-the-art laboratory techniques including fluorescence microscopy, transgenic models, gene chip arrays, NMR, mass spectrometry, computational pharmacology, and x-ray crystallography are used.

Our Summer Research Program was featured in the Winter 1999 issue of Winds of Change, an American Indian education and opportunity journal. In the article, Dr. Ty Reidhead, a Mandan Indian at the White River Indian Health Service in White River, Arizona, who was one of the first students accepted into the Summer Research Program, reflected upon his experience in the program. Dr. Reidhead said, “The work that I performed, and just the time that I spent that summer, proved to be a valuable and nearly essential part of my undergraduate education.”

Since the inception of this program over 100 students have conducted mentored summer research projects.

The 2011 participating students were (left to right): Abebayehu Zula, Yashuan Chao, Lindsay Garcia, Theresa Ten Eyck, Valerie Olson and Jenna Hirsch. This past summer Abe Zula, a senior at the Metropolitan State College of Denver majoring in chemistry and biology, worked on a project focused on brain calcium channels. Yashuan Chao is currently a junior majoring in biology at the University of Colorado Denver Campus. Her summer project used molecular structure approaches and was related to the development of new anti-malarial drugs. Lindsay Garcia, a senior chemistry major at California State University, Stanislaus, conducted research related to novel treatments for colorectal cancer. Theresa Ten Eyck, a senior biochemistry major at New York University, and Valerie Olson, a senior biology major at Colorado State University, both worked on molecular structure projects related to cancer. Jenna Hirsch is a senior biology and chemistry double major at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Her project focused on autophagy, the immune system and cancer.

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