University of Pennsylvania

While educating youth about neuroscience concepts and research is certainly valuable and personally rewarding, I believe it is also imperative for the neuroscience community to share findings with the general adult public. With the increasing prevalence of neuroscience terms and sensationalized articles in today’s media, learning about research findings directly from the primary investigator would be a unique opportunity for the general audience. I formalized these ideas to form a public lecture series in 2013. Open to all, free to attend, and held on the Penn campus, the lecture series consists of three 15-minute lectures given by Penn neuroscience faculty members, with a brief Q&A session following each talk. In addition, a current Ph.D. student emcees the event and provides a brief introduction to the neuroscience topics that will be covered. After the lectures conclude, everyone is invited to stay for a catered reception where the public, PhD students and other neuroscientists (self-identified with name tags), and Penn faculty (including the speakers) can mingle. In this way, the Neuroscience Public Lecture series achieves its goals to: 1) promote the importance of neuroscience research to the general public, 2) advertise the accomplishments of esteemed Penn neuroscience faculty members, and 3) encourage conversations between the general public and neuroscientists. Our most recent event was held on March 31st, 2016 and entitled “The Autistic Brain: Piecing the Puzzle Together.”

BAW provided us with a forum to promote neuroscience research through the public lecture series. I’ve planned 5 lectures over the past 2 years with tremendous success in terms of attendance and feedback of all involved.

The general public is interested in the brain, just come up with creative and catchy phrases for the topics covered and people will come.