Rapid expansion of knowledge in biomedicine challenges university educational programs to provide expertise in all areas. Surgical education is further compounded by limited availability of biological materials and shrinking availability of expert educators for increasingly specialized procedures. By combining teleconferencing, telepresence, and virtual reality, Tele-immersion enables teachers and students to interact with three-dimensional models, point, gesture, converse, and see each other. Tele-immersion combines the superior display of CAVE and ImmersaDesk virtual reality systems with advanced network capabilities to make learning environments so compelling that people use them even when they are in the same room. We will demonstrate and assess Tele-immersive environments for surgical education. Our team at the University of Illinois at Chicago includes medical and visualization experts from the Virtual Reality in Medicine Laboratory and virtual reality and networking experts from the Electronic Visualization Lab. This collaboration has already produced successful demonstrations of Tele-immersive biomedical environments, including the Virtual Temporal Bone  Advanced network features of the Next Generation Internet, such as quality of service guarantees and data privacy and security will permit Tele-immersive environments derived from models of patient data. This may ultimately have widespread impact on daily practice of the surgical specialties.