Brain Awareness Week (BAW) is a national campaign occurring in March of every year with the goal of promoting public interest in neuroscience. The event occurs worldwide and brings together researchers, educators and students who host interactive lectures and activities for various institutions, such as K-12 classrooms, museums and libraries.

Within Temple University's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Program in the College of Liberal Arts (CLA), professors Mansi Shah and David Waxler have been spearheading yearly BAW events for K-12 students. This year, COVID-19 posed some unique challenges to how the normally interactive, activity-based BAW is run. The audience consisted of students at Bodine High School in North Philadelphia. Because the high school students were attending virtual schooling at the time, the format of BAW was adapted to include more pertinent issues, such as COVID-19, and to provide insight into the scientific process.

Thus, in March 2021 BAW was hosted virtually with the theme "Science: From Basic Research to the Clinic." The event featured three distinguished researchers from across Temple, each of whom spent some time describing their own work and then including an interactive activity/demonstration. Each speaker ended their portion by taking questions from a very enthusiastic group of students at Bodine.

The first speaker, Associate Professor Debra Bangasser in the Department of Psychology and director of the CLA Neuroscience Program, ran students through the basic science behind her work on sex differences in stress responses. This was followed by a demonstration by graduate student Samantha Eck on using microscopy to visualize mRNA labeling. 

The next speaker was Professor Jason Chein, also in the Department of Psychology, and director of Temple's cutting-edge neuroimaging center, TUBRIC, who gave an overview of human brain imaging and then took students on a virtual tour of the center and its fMRI machine. To demonstrate how an imaging study would work, Dr. Chein used a pineapple as a stand-in, and students were able to see the "anatomy" of the pineapple in real-time.

Finally, we ended with Clinical Professor Jason Gallagher from the Department of Pharmacology at the School of Medicine at Temple. Dr. Gallagher's work is focused on immunology, and recently he has been part of assessing the factors that make individuals susceptible to COVID-19 infections. For his part of BAW, Dr. Gallagher went over the COVID-19 infection and how the vaccines were developed. 

Despite the changes to the BAW format, the event was able to convey the key processes involved in scientific discovery and give more insight into COVID-19 for this group of motivated high school students at Bodine. David Bungard, science department chair at Bodine, agreed, saying that, "students truly enjoyed the event…and they particularly liked hearing how experiments were designed and carried out."

Professors Mansi Shah and David Waxler are looking forward to BAW 2022, with Dr. Shah adding, "this pandemic has really put the spotlight on science, and being able to showcase how exciting and accessible science can be, is something I look forward to continuing."