The Center for Behavioral Neuroscience helps the next generation of scientists investigate the body's most complex organ.
“Hi Ralph!” exclaims Jack Boyette, a rising sixth grader at Renfroe Middle School in Decatur, Ga., to the sheep brain he holds in his right hand. He and his partner, Evan O’Brien, also heading into the sixth grade this fall, then team up to use forceps to point out the different parts of Ralph the brain.
They were two of 32 middle school students who participated in a week-long Brain Camp, filled with activities ranging from brain dissection, to constructing neurons out of beads and performing experiments involving the senses, including optical illusions.
During one week in July, middle schoolers like Jack and Evan got the chance dig into the folds of brains while a college-age student investigated the areas of the brain involved in pain. Meanwhile, a recent high school graduate used robots to explore how neurons are involved in the mechanics of movement.
With microscopes and lab notebooks in hand, this diverse group students were part of a range of summertime activities presented by the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, headquartered at Georgia State, aimed at exciting interest in the sciences, especially the science of the body’s most complex organ.
Across the partner institutions in the CBN — which include Georgia State, Georgia Tech, Emory University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College and Spelman College — the students are part of an educational pipeline that the center’s leaders hope will translate into the next generation of scientists who will make new discoveries and bolster America’s position as a leader in the sciences.
The programs include Brain Camp, designed for middle school students and held at Renfroe Middle School in Decatur; the Institute on Neuroscience (ION) for high school students and recent high school graduates; and the Behavioral Research Advancements in Neuroscience (BRAIN) program for college undergraduate research.
At their core, BRAIN, ION and Brain Camp — which have impacted more than 800 students over the years — bring the basics of science to students and give them experience with the basis of all research, the scientific method, which is essential to any investigation.
“One of the things the programs bring is interesting scientific research topics such as why animals fight and why they reproduce,” said H. Elliott Albers, director of the CBN and Regents’ Professor of neuroscience at Georgia State. “This inherently interesting material has a scientific foundation, so that students can learn about the fundamentals of the scientific method in a way that is fun and entertaining.
As Athieno Ngowe, 11, picked apart the tough dura mater covering the brain, her partner, Sophie Horan, took notes.
While the middle schoolers probe what makes the nervous system work, high school and college undergraduate students are delving deeper into neuroscience through lab apprenticeships at CBN member institutions. Both BRAIN and ION contain a crash course in classroom based neuroscience education, but then the students move to the laboratories and conduct mini-experiments which give them real research experience.
“Whether BRAIN fellows or ION scholars contribute to ongoing research endeavors, are given a small piece of a bigger research project, or even design and collect preliminary data on their own experimental questions, the summer research experience provides insight to the scientific process, integration into the scientific community, and ideas about careers in science,” said Kyle Frantz, associate professor of neuroscience at Georgia State and coordinator of the programs.
On the first floor of the natural science center at Georgia State, ION student Venkat Goli simulates positions a robot on the ground to simulate how the activity of neurons translates into motor control, producing different movements depending on how the neurons burst with activity — or don’t.
Another ION scholar, Maithreyi Shankar, from Boston, Mass., will be a freshman at the University of Southern California this fall. She worked in a lab at Emory University, and is studying learning and memory involving fruit flies.
Shamaal Blair, a student at Miller Grove High School in DeKalb County, worked on a behavioral research project at Spelman College, exploring how different population densities of red flower beetles affect reproductive traits.
“I think the program is awesome because I get a chance to work in the lab, because in my high school, we don't get that opportunity,” she said.
Going further in academic life, the BRAIN program puts undergraduate students from different colleges and universities from around the nation into lab apprenticeships at CBN institution labs. At Georgia State University, Nina Waldron, a sophomore at Smith College in Massachusetts, is looking at part of the brain involved in the development of morphine tolerance.
The science education activities sponsored by the CBN were funded through grants from the National Science Foundation and the Georgia Research Alliance.