Brain Awareness: How Student Volunteers Rebuilt UVA’s Neuroscience Outreach Program
Written by Raquel Miralles
Neuroscience outreach isn’t new at the University of Virginia: researchers have been communicating the importance of research to the public through Brain Awareness Week since 1996. However, in March 2020, all in-person outreach was abruptly halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But community interest in neuroscience outreach remained through the pandemic. “Teachers were continually reaching out … there was a fire under us to revitalize the program” said Addison Webster, a neuroscience PhD candidate and current organizer for Brain Awareness Outreach.
In 2023, the time was right to revive neuroscience outreach at UVA. Mark Beenhakker, PhD, an associate professor of Pharmacology who led previous Brain Awareness Week efforts, worked with Ian Kimbrough, PhD, a new assistant professor of Neuroscience with significant outreach experience at previous institutions, to bring back the program. They enlisted the help of neuroscience graduate program (NGP) students Addison Webster and Nicholas Conley to organize the outreach efforts.
In previous years, nearly all volunteers for Brain Awareness were neuroscience graduate students, but because of the three-year gap in outreach efforts, most students who previously participated in Brain Awareness Week had graduated. Webster notes that “Our biggest challenge was raising awareness within our UVA neuroscience community to find volunteers.” This left a disconnect between a community yearning for the return of in-person outreach and a group of volunteers new to neuroscience outreach.
Training new volunteers and visiting K-12 schools was a learning process. “We couldn’t reach as many students as we wanted to at first,” said Webster, “The first year allowed us to troubleshoot and refine our structure for the future.” In following years, with the help of fellow neuroscience graduate students Jieming Fu and Sarah Hunter-Chang, aspects of the outreach process were streamlined, including a new volunteer management system and tailored presentations for each age group. Since then, Brain Awareness Outreach has expanded to reach nearly 1,000 students in the 2023‑24 academic year, and volunteers come from many programs and departments throughout the UVA School of Medicine and the College of Arts & Sciences.
Volunteers for Brain Awareness Outreach visit local K-12 classrooms and bring hands-on demo materials along with real human brains. Through these visits, K-12 students can witness the complexity of the nervous system firsthand, and some even begin to see the exciting possibility of scientific research as a career path. School visits are also an educational experience for the UVA volunteers, as outreach challenges researchers to expand their communication skills to a much broader audience — even first graders ask thought-provoking questions.
The success of the program is largely motivated by a growing volunteer executive committee: Addison Webster, Sarah Hunter-Chang, Jieming Fu, and Katherine Canada, all current NGP students, as well as Thaddeus Weigel and Raquel Miralles, former NGP students that are still part of the UVA neuroscience community. Faculty advisor Ian Kimbrough offers essential support for the executive committee by organizing the outreach program, acquiring demo materials, and liaising with the UVA Department of Neuroscience, which provides funding and administrative support for Brain Awareness Outreach.
Brain Awareness Outreach also works beyond science classes. To bring the beauty of the scientific world to local art students, Sarah Hunter-Chang, a UVA student researcher and artist, initiated a collaboration with Jennifer Kett, a studio art teacher at Charlottesville High School. Together, they created “Magnify”, which has become an integral component of Brain Awareness Outreach. Magnify’s program is multifaceted: UVA neuroscience researchers visit Charlottesville High School art classes to present their research. Later, these same students visit UVA labs to see what neuroscience research looks like firsthand. This culminates in an original, science-inspired piece of art created by each student displayed annually in a local gallery. The 2024-2025 Magnify gallery showcase is scheduled for May, with exact date and location details to come.
(Pictured above: Neuroscience-inspired art from Charlottesville High School art student Joshua Bleakley. )
Building bridges like these to non-scientists is essential to explain who we are and why our research matters. UVA neuroscience researchers intentionally brought community outreach back post-pandemic and rebuilt the Brain Awareness Outreach program, recognizing the value of outreach to build public trust in research and promote critical thinking. With the future of research funding currently in the spotlight, public outreach and effective science communication are more critical now than ever.
Brain Awareness Outreach is actively planning school visits for the current and upcoming academic years. If interested in volunteering, please contact uvabrains@gmail.com for more information.
Written by Raquel Miralles