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[K. Johnson] I think that neuroscience gets some coverage in most high school psychology classes, maybe a bit more if students are taking AP credit, but it’s covered tangentially, and again, I think that that’s the goal of this competition, is to give students an opportunity to delve much deeper into the field of neuroscience and really understand how brain and behavior connect.

I think there’s also a lot of interest among students in the diseases that are related to the brain, and we were delighted we have, at this event, partners from the Alzheimer’s center, from the center for autism, from Parkinson’s disease foundation. It’s a wonderful opportunity to help students to see how the field of neuroscience can hopefully inform treatment of these diseases in the future.

This event came to be back in the 90s, actually, at the University of Maryland, the medical school campus at the University of Maryland, but he was very interested in trying to do outreach to high school students about the field of neuroscience, and so, he began, I understand, it was initially just a local competition, and then it spread, and so, now there are local competitions all over the country that feed into the United States championship. And, now there’s actually an international competition as well. So, there’s nationals in the United States, in Canada, several countries in Europe, Australia, and they all feed into the international competition.

It’s a great way, I think that the psychology department can play a role in that. We actually had students contacting us, asking us if we would hold a local competition, and we were delighted. It’s a great way for us to do outreach to the community. And, we had a lot of graduate students and undergraduate students helping as well from both the psychology department and the biology department.