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Miller School Public Health Student Awarded the Graduate Student Exemplar

Daniel Samano, MD, an MPH candidate at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences, was awarded the Graduate Student Exemplar by the University of Miami Graduate School.

Each spring semester, the graduate school hosts the Annual Awards Ceremony to recognize the achievements that graduate students and faculty have made during the academic year. The achievements, which are typically in support of graduate education and the teaching, research, and service missions of the University of Miami, are recognized through seven different awards.

The Graduate Student Exemplar, one of the prestigious awards, is granted to a graduate student who has overcome obstacles to reach success or has been helpful to others, while also excelling academically. For this year’s spring semester ceremony, Dr. Samano was announced as one of seven nominees for the award.

Samano, who is from Mexico City, Mexico, decided to continue his career and education at the Miller School towards the end of 2016, and in early 2017, began the accelerated Master of Public Health (MPH) program at the Department of Public Health Sciences. At the time, he also began working on the Latin-American Policy Project with José Szapocznik, Ph.D.professor of public health sciences, architecture, psychology, and educational and psychological studies at the University of Miami, and Adriane Gelpi, Ph.D., associate professor of public health at the Miller School, as his mentors.

Within four months of beginning the program and a new job, Samano faced an unexpected obstacle. Due to changes in government, he lost the loans and scholarships that had made it possible for him to begin his journey at the Miller School.

”Within that time, I had to find another job within the Miller School, so that I could continue my career, as well as my education at UM,” Samano said.

At the time, David Lee, Ph.D.professor and graduate programs director at the Miller School’s Department of Public Health Sciences, who knew of what had happened, offered Samano a job as a senior research associate for a clinical trial on smoking cessation with himself and Taghrid Asfar, Ph.D., as his mentors.

Concurrently, Samano was offered another job as a senior research associate at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. He worked on a study that focused on breathing difficulties that patients experience after spinal cord injury. The principal investigators of this study were Shirin Shafazand, MD, and Mark Nesh, Ph.D. FACSM, who were also his mentors.

“It was after that summer that the University of Miami sponsored me for my working visa,” Samano said. “I was officially an employee of the university and was able to fund my MPH through the University of Miami’s tuition remission program.”

Samano will earn his MPH degree in August 2019 and he is currently the clinical research coordinator for the Department of Neurological Surgery at The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and the Department of Neurology. He oversees four national traumatic brain injury and epilepsy-related clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and National Football League. 

He does good science and is resilient. It was really touch and go for a while, as to whether or not Daniel was going to be able to finish his degree. I am grateful that I was able to mentor him along the way, but it was through his own perseverance that he was able to overcome these challenges, ” Dr. Lee said.

Samano earned his medical degree from Anahuac University in Mexico City, Mexico in 2012 and obtained his medical license the same year. Before moving to Miami, he was a neurosurgery pre-residency fellow and a clinical hospitalist at Methodist-American British Cowdray Medical Center. Samano was also involved in several public health research projects at the Mexican National Public Health Institute, including Mexico City’s Diabetes Study and PRONTO International, an OB/GYN mortality prevention program. He also developed a pregnancy mortality prevention training program for the health department in Puebla, Mexico.

Written by Amanda Torres
June 5, 2019