We recently spent 2 days at SONA, the Society of Neuroscience Africa conference that occurs every two years. This year, it was in Rabat, Morroco, and we had a talk on low cost ways to do high tech neuroscience. We brought a ton on inventory with us, and we are happy to report we have scientists in Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Uganda, and Cameroon now all bringing back gear to their growing labs. They are putting us to work! with custom requests to modify our Manipulators and Scopes, and also to move faster on our DC amp prototypes that will allow EKG and whole cell recording.
We were also more than happy to donate 8 SpikerBox Bundles (4 regular, 4 EMG) to the TReND (Teaching and Research in Neuroscience for Development in Africa) program. Sadiq Yusuf, of Kampala International University, is co-director of TReND and he, along with Lucia Prieto Godino, Tom Baden, and Jimena Berni, is building a training course in neurophysiology currently taking place in Uganda that is open to African undergraduate and graduate students studying neuroscience. This course is based on the “Neural Systems and Behavior Course” from the Marine Biological Laboratory, which is dear to our hearts. They have already been up and running for two years, running workshops in the summers. We thank TReND for inviting us; we met many new colleagues and customers challenging us to build more and more powerful and portable tools.
