University of Valencia

This year, the project involved the use of the public space (the street) during Fallas Festival to exhibit outreach posters from the different Neuroscience labs based in our region. 15 labs participated with their posters. We also had a poster explaining the use of animals in biomedical research. This exhibition was posted from 15th to 17th of March at the Falla Plaza de Jesús in Valencia. Moreover, on the evening of the 16th we celebrated our “outreach poster session,” where investigators from the different labs, showed and explained to the public their research. We obtained in total about 100 visitors to this poster session. Moreover, we released a free journal that collected the information of the labs that participated in our exhibition and in the talks. Finally, 4 neuroscientists gave talks to the audience in a prepared area in the street. The topics of the talks were addiction, brain changes induced during maternity, neural stem cells and its potential use in treatment of CNS diseases and behaviour changes induced by diseases. The speakers were very well received by the audience and the audience participated by asking interesting questions to the speakers. To finalize the event children blew up air balloons to recreate the sound of fireworks, which are very similar to neuronal recordings. In this way, we also captured the attention of kids that previously visited the poster exhibition with a guide.

BAW activities impact the perception of the people about neuroscientists. Moreover, attendees were very interested in following the advances in the neuroscience field. Finally, we also could see that attendees have learned about and give more value to neuroscience research.

It is very important to have young people as part of the organising committee since they attracted young people to the exhibition.