Leadership Initiatives Youth Development Program Features a Week Dedicated to Neuroscience!

The Leadership Initiatives Advanced Medical Neuroscience Summit is a program that’s available for rising freshmen in high school to rising freshmen in college that gives students the opportunity to live for a short time at a college campus (Gorgeous Georgetown), attend lectures and learn from neuroscience professors, tour high-tech labs, and perform hands-on research. This is our kind of student summer gig!

Backyard Brains and the Leadership Initiatives program have a shared interest in exposing students to real neuroscience at an early age, while simultaneously doing everything in our power to help those students “self-visualize” as neuroscientists themselves! It’s this kind of work that will help to inspire the next generation of creative thinkers and neuroscientists.

We talked to one of the organizers, Morgan Biele, about this year’s experience. Morgan is a past attendee of the program and was excited to share how this summer’s Neuroscience Summit went.

“Over the course of the week, students were visiting labs and listening to lectures from expert neuroscientists. I’d recommend watching the video we produced to learn all about the program!

“During our summit, students used several muscle SpikerBoxes, Human-Human Interface kits, and RoboRoach kits; the students absolutely loved learning with them. They had been in awe at the high-tech tools the professors and researchers used, but the Backyard Brains equipment really made neuroscience experimentation feel accessible to them.

“The students were completely fascinated. We noticed that the hands-on activities are invaluable for maintaining student engagement and curiosity, so we’d love to consider integrating more of that accessible technology into our programs.”

I asked Morgan about how Backyard Brains was discovered by the program. She laughed, and explained how she had used Backyard Brains kits in school and knew they had to include them in the summer program, saying,
“We’re proud to have Backyard Brains equipment in the program and displayed on the website for Leadership Initiatives.” She had been introduced by her biology teacher, and even competed in Science Fair with a poster project performed with our Heart and Brain SpikerBox.

She wrote, “I believe you mentioned being curious about seeing a science fair project I completed with Backyard Brains too, so I’ve attached my science fair project poster (this was my first one, and I’ve noticed many flaws in hindsight just to inform you! Also, my hypothesis wasn’t supported, so maybe it isn’t very valuable…!)”

We loved this poster at the office, and think that Morgan’s concern that her hypothesis wasn’t supported is one that many students share. But that’s science! It’s okay if your project doesn’t prove your expectations, in fact sometimes it’s just as fascinating when it doesn’t.

Be on the lookout for more collaborations between Backyard Brains and the Leadership Initiatives Medical Neuroscience Summit in the future!

For now, I can say this: Teachers, this is a fantastic opportunity for your students! There are costs associated with attending, but there are scholarships and information for helping make it very affordable on their website.