Applying for Residency
Residency Program applications for the residency program are annually accepted through October for the incoming residency group who will join us the following July. Residency Program applicants must submit their information via the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS®), made available through the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Medical Students
Thank you for your interest in a visiting student rotation with us in the Department of Neurosurgery at UNM. We believe that this is a great opportunity for you to evaluate our program and will allow you to assess how well you will fit in with our team. Visiting Student rotations are a coordinated effort between the Student Affairs offices at UNM and the requesting student's home institution. Information and forms for medical students interested in applying for an elective here at UNM are located on the School of Medicine website.
This rotation will give you the best exposure to our various subspecialties, attendings, and residents. Applications are screened and rotations granted based on merit. We strive to accommodate requests for specific dates and are generally able to work around differences in the UNM and requesting student's home institution schedules.To get started, please visit the VSLO website, and follow these instructions.
Research
Research is a major focus of the UNM Neurosurgery residency program. UNM Neurosurgery has an incredible support team for the residents, with a research coordinator, two research assistants, and 4 pre-residents who are focused on helping support resident research as they work together on projects in a collaborative environment. There are as many as 40-50 medical students working actively to support research at any one time. The research opportunities are abundant. Dr. Bowers’ Frailty and Neurosurgical Outcomes Data Science Lab publishes approximately 40 papers a year, and many residents, pre-residents, and students work in this lba. Dr. Spader has funded research on charting native american pediatric head size growth and other pediatric topics. We also have basic science bench research opportunities, where residents can work with collaborating faculty, such as Dr. Sara Piccirillo, PhD, on Glioblastoma (GBM) cell line genetic studies. Uniquely, we have collaborative opportunities for biomedical engineering with Sandia National Laboratory and Los Alamos Laboratory, two world-renowned engineering centers widely considered among the top handful of labs in the world.
The residents have a large resident library conference room where they meet with research personnel and also utilize this quiet space to get research done without interruption. There are drinks and snacks provided in the space. Research planning with faculty is done in faculty offices, where there is privacy and 1:1 time to provide direction and mentorship for all research projects with the appropriate PI(s). Faculty within the Department of Neurosurgery, and in the Institution, fully support the research efforts. The department chair and program director, Drs. Schmidt and Bowers, meet every other week with the residents and pre-residents, to go over their research projects and set goals for the following meeting and follow-up on progress from the prior meetings’ goals. We follow the Intensive Research Initiative (IRI), as outlined in Dr. Bowers’ Publication on rapid increase of academic production within a neurosurgery program (Zafar Karimov, MD, Meic H Schmidt, MD, MBA, Chirag D Gandhi, MD, Jordan Vanderhooft, Chad D Cole, MD, MS, Alan A Stein, Fawaz Al-Mufti, Christian A Bowers. Impact of Intense Research Interventions on Scholarly Output by Neurosurgery Residents and Medical Students, Neurosurgery, Volume 67, Issue Supplement_1, December 2020).We do not have an annual publication requirement for each resident, but we have required monthly research goals that the residents set for themselves. This method was published, and has produced great results. It is working incredibly well with our current resident and pre-residency fellows.