Brain Education Week

Event Description:

Every year during the Dana Foundation’s Brain Awareness Week, graduate students from the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program at Yale organize Brain Education Day (BED). Over the past ten years, the in-person event brings 80-100 local 6th-12th grade students to Yale’s medical campus for a full day of learning about neuroscience from faculty, graduate students, postbacs, and postdocs. Attendees hear from a talk from a faculty member about their science and their pathway to get there, and then rotate through four stations to learn about sensory physiology, how we image human brains, brain-machine interfaces and programming, and brain anatomy through a sheep brain dissection. Last year, we moved the event online and students heard graduate student presentations about their journey to science and their current research. This year, we are planning a series of virtual events where students will engage in hands-on sensory physiology activities using kits we send home to the students, hear graduate student presentations about their journeys to science, and participate in virtual real-time “experiments” to learn about human cognition including topics such as memory and executive function.