Ways to Engage
Our optical imaging laboratories offer high school and undergraduate students from across the state a part-time internship. Currently enrolled students in our part-time internship programs come from Wayzata High School, Augsburg University and UMN.
Aaron Kerlin hosted and advised an undergraduate student as part of the 2020 Pathways to Research Program conducted by the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Minnesota. This program provides an opportunity for students from populations underrepresented in research to advance their careers.
Our faculty participate in Brain Awareness Week (every October) which disseminates our research to middle school students across MN.
Several of our labs participated in the high school neuroscience summer program for under-represented minorities called Go4Brains which brought high-school students from underrepresented groups in the Twin Cities to the UMN campus for a week during the summer. Students learned about Neuroscience, career opportunities in STEM fields, and were introduced to near-peers and faculty mentors.
This MDT runs an invited seminar series in Optical Imaging and Brain Science. Pre-eminent speakers in this series included faculty researchers from MIT (Mriganka Sur, Elly Nedivi), Columbia University (Rafa Yuste), UC-Berkeley (Na Ji, Hillel Adesnik), and UC-San Diego (David Kleinfeld), Howard Hughes Medical Institute HHMI (Eric Schreiter), Max Planck Florida Institute (David Fitzpatrick), among several others.