Joining the British Brain Bee Scientific Committee!

I was recently asked to join the scientific committee for the British Brain Bee! This means I will be helping create the exams and other activities for next year’s Brain Bee competition in the UK.

To introduce myself on the British Brain Bee website, I was asked to create a short personal history.

To create this timeline, I used the free online graphic design tool website Canva.

I’m always surprised by how helpful it can be when I need to summarize my PhD life. By forcing myself to condense everything from the past 5 years into a short and sweet, easy to digest morsel, I actually also force myself to understand more clearly the fundamental structure of my thought processes, which at times seem totally chaotic and in a million directions at once. But when I make these little distillations, I’m soothed by a sense of purpose and “coming together”, which I don’t really get from most other traditional scientific outputs.

In a way, this is one of the greatest benefits of scientific outreach for the scientist. Answering the question, “How can I connect my research to the experiences and interests of every day folk?” is an exercise I cannot recommend highly enough, especially for neuroscientists.