Liz’s Lab Community Outreach & Service
For 15 years, Dr. Liz has been actively engaged in neuroscience education in the community. These neuroscience outreach campaigns have ranged from local classroom visits to event collaborations with museums, libraries, and civic centers to public presentations about neuroscience-related issues. These efforts have spanned across several states and institutions, capture a range of ages across the life, and focus on reaching underprivileged populations of diverse backgrounds.
Books & Brains Program
The Books & Brains-NOLA Public Library program, supported by the IF/THEN Initiative, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Lyda Hill Philanthropies, will leverage the public library system as a venue that can both permit delivery of neuroscience/psychology/mental health content via a one-time presentation by a STEM role model and provide opportunities for sustained in-person (book check-out) or remote (activity videos) engagement with that content. For this program, Project Mentors (undergraduate and graduate student volunteers) will 1) read a neuroscience/psychology-related children’s book (e.g. “Your Fantastic Elastic Brain” by Dr. JoAnn Deak) and lead a socially-distanced craft activity at a NOLA public library, 2) record their presentation for synchronous remote engagement as well as asynchronous future viewing on a video-sharing platform, and 3) donate a set of neuroscience/psychology-related children’s books to the library for continued content engagement by subsequent visitors.
A key feature of this project is its inclusive access approach, which is particularly critical in the current pandemic climate. Indeed, partnerships with libraries that serve underprivileged areas within the greater New Orleans metropolitan area will be prioritized. As a means to promote diversity in neuroscience, children’s books written by authors with doctoral education and who are members of underrepresented groups in STEM professions will be prioritized. Neuroscience activities hosted will be deliberately designed to utilize commonly available craft supplies readily available in most households and free craft supply kits will be available at host libraries for participants to pick up and use when participating in the session remotely. Given that reliable internet access is not obtainable for all participants, extra craft kits with activity instructions will be available at the library for check-out along with a series of neuroscience children’s books. Finally, for those for whom transportation to library sites represents an access barrier, neuroscience books will be deposited in a series of free little lending library boxes around the New Orleans area as part of a complementary program, the Books & Brains-Free Lending Library initiative (pending a positive funding decision).
Successful implementation of this program will lay the foundation for expansion of the program. Indeed, the broader Books & program will both 1) geographically beyond the New Orleans area to capture rural areas of Louisiana and surrounding states and 2) content-wise beyond the neurosciences and into other STEM domains.
Past Projects
Phoenix, Arizona 2005-2013
Dr. Liz got her start in neuroscience education in the community as an undergraduate student at Arizona State University (ASU) by taking an active role in the outreach program championed by my mentor Dr. Heather Bimonte-Nelson and accompanied her inspirational mentor to countless classroom visits around the ‘Valley’. After a few years, Dr. Heather, Dr. Liz (then a graduate student), and the rest of the ASU outreach team organized the ASU Brain Fair, a field trip program in which ASU Psychology trainees hosted neuroscience activities for underprivileged 4-5th grade children at the ASU campus by arranging and paying for the costs of the buses. For many of the children, this event was not only their first exposure to a college campus but in fact it was their first field trip. Inspired by her mentor, Dr. Liz collaborated with the ASU Camp Sparky community engagement program to host a series of neuroscience stations at the Psychology Department building for underprivilaged kids.
To ‘train the trainers’, Dr. Liz also collaborated with the Arizona Science Center to host a panel discussion to help science teachers incorporate neuroscience education into their lessons and demonstrated hand-on neuroscience craft activities to museum attendees. Finally, Dr. Liz organized the Psychology Department’s Brain Station as part of the ASU Night of the Open Door, in which thousands of community members visited the ASU campus to participate in STEM activities. The outcomes of many of these efforts were presented Society for Neuroscience annual meetings. These collective efforts impacted >3,000 lay people.
Morgantown, West Virginia 2014-2020
Following in the footsteps of her graduate mentor, Dr. Liz got involved in mentoring and outreach activities almost as soon as she arrived at West Virginia University (WVU) to begin her post-doctoral fellowship. One of her most significant contributions in her time there was serving as the long-time (5+ years) advisor to the WVU Neuroscience Club, a student run organization dedicated to enhancing access to neuroscience careers. Dr. Liz led club leaders in developing the “Train Our Brains” educational campaign that included classroom visits to dozens of area schools, collaborations with local community centers such as The Shack Neighborhood House and the Mountaineer Boys and Girls Club, partnerships with local museums, participating in brain disease walks, and setting up booths at local and state fairs. In addition to benefitting >5,000 West Virginia children, teachers, parents, and community members, these efforts helped not only to fulfill academic requirements for service or providing a line on their resumes, but also helped trainees just entering the field of neuroscience further their own content understanding and provided club members with leadership, teaching, and organization experiences that benefit a range of careers.
With the support of the Department of Neuroscience Chair, Dr. Randy Nelson, members of the WVU outreach team wanted to develop an outreach program whose impact went beyond providing neuroscience education for the public and professional development for the volunteers and provided a tangible benefit to the community. The team identified that food insecurity is a significant issue facing West Virginia school children and impeding their ability to ‘train their brains’ and developed the Feed Our Brains program. For this program, organizers set up a donation fund and hosted ‘dine and donate’ dinners to raise funds sufficient to contribute $1,000 to Monongalia County Schools, enough to fund all meals of 3 students for an entire year, and visited a local school to teach students about neuroscience and proper brain nutrition. The 2020 school shut-downs required a shift in approach for the second year of the program so with the help of materials generously provided by the Dana Foundation, the Liz’s Lab team assembled 2,300 neuroscience activity packets to be included with meal kits prepared for area children. The Feed Our Brains program is one of the few of its kind in the neuroscience community so to empower other scientists to engage in community outreach and launch programs of their own, the Feed Our Brains program was presented as a poster at the SfN 2020 annual meeting and has received media attention through several outlets. This program needs your support; to learn more about the program and to make a donation, please click the button below.
