Last Friday, UC Riverside hosted Brain Awareness Day, a volunteer-driven event that brought more than 400 middle and high school students from across our region to campus to learn hands-on about how the brain works.

From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., the Student Recreation Center breezeway featured 20 interactive science booths where visitors explored brain dissections, animal skulls, and neuron communication — all guided by graduate student volunteers from the Neuroscience Graduate Student Association, or NGSA.

“We had guided tours for visitors that highlighted key UCR neuroscience research areas,” said David Nikom, president of NGSA. “We got good interest this year — 20 local schools applied to send their students, and we could accommodate only half of them.”

Courtney Scaramella, outreach chair of NGSA, said that while NGSA has other outreach opportunities throughout the year, Brain Awareness Day is its biggest event. 

“Brain Awareness Day brings together principal investigators, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates, as well as collaborators from different departments such as the Department of Evolution Ecology & Organismal Biology, Department of Psychology, and Department of Physics and Astronomy, to get kids excited about science,” she said. “This year it feels particularly important to share with kids the impact that science can have in their own lives, while also showing them that science and the people doing the science are approachable, regular people like them.”