Spring Into Science
Spring into Science is hosted by the Graduate Women in Science organization at AU and offers 30+ hands-on exhibits that allow families to explore a variety of science and engineering topics by interacting and discovering.
The Neurophysics lab runs a table teaching young interested students from local schools about how the neurons in their brains grow, develop, and work to allow us to think. Children get to put together foam puzzles, color pictures of neurons.
Children get to look through a microscope at real neurons grown and stained in our lab.
Summer Science Institute (SSI)
The Summer Science Institute is a program for highly motivated rising 11th-12th grade students from Alabama and Georgia with a high aptitude and interest in pursuing a degree in STEM.
The Neurophysics lab runs a training module for SSI that teaches students the importance and role of models in scientific study. Models are frameworks of causal rules and relationships about how the universe works. Yet, the ability to create a predictive model of observations based on specific causation rules is difficult. This module teaches students how to create a model using the example of intracellular trafficking mechanics. To highlight the importance of creativity, students use hot wheels tracks (which represent polymerized cytoskeleton networks) and hot wheels cars (which represent molecular motors). They then use specific rule for how cars and tracks are allowed to work in order to reproduce long-range motility. Students then compare their model results to experimentally observed data taken in the lab of single endosomes trafficking along a neuronal axon.