March 13, 2024 — Similar to the way the human brain is split into two hemispheres, with each side contributing to different aspects of a person’s personality traits and strengths, Maryam Rahman, M.D. ’05, M.S., views the different features of her clinical and research career as separate but complementary.

“My natural skill set is built for teaching and surgery, so research comes much harder for me,” said Rahman, an associate professor in the Lillian S. Wells Department of Neurosurgery at the UF College of Medicine. “Research requires you to slow down and contemplate and fail, then come up with a new hypothesis. And that iterative process is the reason I continue to do it, because it’s the only way you can look a patient in the eye after surgery and say, ‘You or your loved one did great with surgery, but at the same time, we want to dedicate ourselves to finding a better way.’”

As the first female neurosurgeon faculty member at UF in Gainesville — an additional female neurosurgeon will join the faculty this summer — Rahman divides her time consulting with patients, performing brain surgeries and conducting research on cancerous brain tumors. Over the past 11 years on faculty at UF, she’s continued to make scientific advances in the field as the composition of neurosurgical teams slowly shifted to include more women.

According to statistics from the American Board of Neurological Surgery, of the 3,500-board certified neurosurgeons in the U.S. only 219 are women—about 6%. Additionally, there are 25 full-time female academic neurosurgeons and one female chair of a neurosurgery department.

For Rahman, whose grandfather and father both practiced family medicine in Pakistan, becoming a physician was a longtime calling for her. But it wasn’t until she took a clinical neuroscience course during her first year of medical school at UF that she settled on her path.

“I completely fell in love with neuro,” she said. “A lot of what you choose in medical school results from the personalities you’re attracted to and people who take a human interest in your success and development. And so some of it is serendipitous, and that’s what happened with me in neurosurgery.”

An instructor from a neuromedicine course took Rahman under his wing and introduced her to faculty members who launched her with research, including two who are still her mentors: William A. Friedman, M.D., and Frank J. Bova, Ph.D.

“I benefited from male mentors who never treated me as a woman in neurosurgery, but as a person in neurosurgery,” said Rahman, who was also the first female president of the Florida Neurosurgical Society, a position she held from 2018 to 2019.

In addition to performing surgeries, Rahman researches malignant gliomas, the most common subtype of primary brain tumors and one of the deadliest forms of cancer. The prognosis for patients who undergo surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy is 18 months.

Rahman was recently awarded a $738,000 grant from Florida Cancer Innovation for preclinical testing of a novel cancer vaccine to treat these tumors.

“We are developing ways to activate the immune system to recognize these tumor cells and kill them,” Rahman said. “Everything we deliver — care, research, education —requires a team, and you can only succeed when you can work well with others. I’m incredibly inspired by the young, enthusiastic, curious people working in the lab behind me to make this work possible.”