We spent a sunny spring Saturday at Oregon Health & Sciences University, in the Collaborative Life Sciences Building along the Willamette River…
It was a great day to bike to the annual Brain Awareness Teacher Workshop, sponsored by OHSU’s Office of Science Education Opportunities, The Moore Institute for Nutrition and Wellness and the OHSU Brain Institute…
Teachers from around the region were excited to learn about adolescent brain development, the importance of early life nutrition, and interact with our enthusiastic Noggin volunteers!
We had another excellent, practiced, multi-institutional art/science outreach crew, which included Chelsey Taylor Anderson and Joey Seuferling from Neuroscience at WSU Vancouver, and Alex Brown, Jennifer Teachworth, Brianna Jacobs, Ankita Guchait, Jessica Patching-Bunch, Jacob Schoen, and Alex Voigt from Psychology at Portland State!
This year’s workshop theme was “Healthy Pleasures, Unhealthy Habits,” and attendees enjoyed relevant, informative and compelling lectures from Bonnie Nagel, Ph.D. (“The Adolescent Brain”) and Susan Bagby, M.D. (“How Early-Life Nutrition Feeds the Obesity Epidemic in Children and Adolescents”)…
Between talks, we spoke with many teachers, parents and children about projects to explore brain structure and function. We answered fascinating questions about autism, drugs, teenage behavior and visual perception, created colorful neurons out of twisting pipe cleaners, and pointed out critical regions and networks in our real human brains…
Jeff even constructed an entire, wearable retina, complete with photoreceptive rod and cone cells!
A productive day of conversation, and demonstration, of techniques, topics and training for area teachers! Many thanks to Kate Stout at the OHSU Brain Institute for welcoming our practiced undergraduate and graduate Noggin educators to the brainy banks of the Willamette…
