FAU MOBILEMINDS
STILES-NICHOLSON BRAIN INSTITUTE
The FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute very generously hosted the leadership, members and friends of Impact the Palm Beaches on April 13th to learn more about their amazing work.
The tours were hosted by Nicole Baganz, Ph.D., Director of Community Engagement and Programming, FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute and David Cinalli, Ph.D. Director of MobileMinds Program, FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute.
The visit began with networking and refreshments and then visitors received an overview of the work of the center, the outreach program ASCEND and learned about IMPACT dollars at work via the MobileMinds program.
Members were also given a tour of this working laboratory. Below are the names of both the people and the labs they visited, an impressive line-up!
Paula Kurdziel, Ph.D. - postdoctoral fellow in the Blakely lab. Paula presented the Blaze microscope which can image the entire mouse brain all at once mapping connections across the entire brain.
Dan Nemeth, Ph.D. - postdoctoral fellow in Ning Quan's lab. Dan showed his electrophysiology station which records electrical activity all the way down to the level of a single neuron.
Lorena Areal, Ph.D. - postdoctoral fellow in the Blakely lab. Lorena demonstrated the confocal microscope which uses lasers to visualize neurons and is powerful enough to image things at the molecular level such as proteins and DNA expression within the cell.
Samantha McGovern - lab manager in Ning Quan's lab. Samantha welcomed us into their lab space and discussed their work on how the immune system interacts with the nervous system.
Lillian Onwuhu-Ekpete - Ph.D. student in Gregg Fields's lab. Lillian’s lab focuses on using animal models to study disease states such as Melanoma.
Sam and Lillian peeled back the curtain a bit and showed/discussed what the everyday life of a neuroscientist is like.
MobileMinds program, a branch of the FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute’s ASCEND (Advancing STEM Engagement through Neuroscience Discovery), was created to help combat that staggering deficiency by bringing STEM education on the road and into the classroom to give students equal access to brain science education.