Leuven Brain Institute

The Leuven Brain Institute hosted several events including four lectures, three demos, two workshops and a guided lab tour related to brain health and brain ageing for Brain Awareness Week 2022. All our events took place live following the national and local Covid rules, the lectures aimed at the general public and adults, the interactive workshops and demos at children, and over 100 people participated in our events.

Besides this, our institute also raised general brain awareness via our dedicated social media channels and the ones from our institute members and national outreach partners such as the Belgian Brain Council (BBC). We (re)posted over 50 messages that week, all related to facts about the brain such as the effects of stroke on cognition (see https://twitter.com/neuropsylab/status/1504735949510660098) and portrayed our research in layman’s terms.

On Wednesday 16th of March, several PhD students, postdocs and staff members of both the Biology department and the Biomedicine department gave workshops where kids could discover how animals see the world, use microscopes to discover how brains look like, and how fluorescence is used to enable this (see pictures). Meanwhile, adults could join several lab tours and visit the state-of-the-art microcopy site of the VIB/KU Leuven BioImaging Core.

After this, miss Jill Kries and miss Lauren Blockmans, postdocs at the Research Group Experimental Oto-rhino-laryngology gave a lecture about language disorders that was very well attended and initiated an interactive and professionally moderated Q&A afterwards. The kids were given a fancy fluorescent vest and sun cap afterwards to literally raise awareness for brain health, a gift they very much appreciated

People subscribed to our email list to learn more about our research, also some seniors enrolled for our studies and brain donation programme.