1. Neuroscience Outreach in Puerto Rico: Impact of the Next Generation Award
Alexandra Colón-Rodríguez
Eileen Rodríguez-Tapia
Chelsea Tiernan

2. What is the Bridge to Neuroscience Workshop (BNW)?
Full-day, experiment-driven workshop
Introduce basic neuroscience concepts
Puerto Rican high school and undergraduate students
Goals
Introduce neuroscience as a discipline and career option
Increase Hispanic and other minorities’ representation in science
Brief overview of the workshop and goals
***If you would like to know more about the workshop and its impact we currently have our poster in the theme H session.
Timeline: first workshops were given in 2011, and we have been continuously offering the workshop for 5 years.

3. The Next Generation Award (NGA)
Recognizes outstanding contributions to public communication, outreach, and education about neuroscience
Nominated by SfN Chapter
Award includes a chapter grant for continuing the chapter’s outreach efforts in the coming year
Eligibility: Nominee must be a pre or postdoctoral student, or a junior faculty member
Importance of the chapter grant:
-funds were released by MiSfN for us to broad our impact…
-purchased additional workshop material (e.g. brains for the sheep brain dissection)
-purchased manuals for the workshop activities, those had the MI-SfN logo
-developed a website for recruitment (my sister did the website for free), so we shouldn’t mention this

4. Impact of BNW After NGA (Spring 2015) Before NGA (2011-2014)
Host institutions
Municipalities of participants
Before NGA ( )
Municipalities of participants
Host institutions
24 Workshops
200 High school students -18 Undergraduate volunteers
368 Undergraduate students -15 Graduate student volunteers
20 Teachers -1 Post doc volunteer
6 Professors
Before NGA
111- High School
~190-Undergraduates
2 host institutions
After NGA
3 new host institutions
Almost same amount of students that were reached from IN ONE SEMESTER!!!
Host Institutions
Universidad de Puerto Rico-Cayey (UPR-Cayey)
UPR-Arecibo
UPR-Humacao
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ponce
Universidad Interamericana de Arecibo

5. Benefits of Chapter Outreach
Publicity
Recruitment

6. Benefits of Chapter Outreach
Broadening the Scope of MI Outreach Efforts

7. Implementing Chapter Outreach for Diverse Populations
What We’ve Learned
Social media as a recruitment & publicity tool
“Relatable” workshop instructors
Motivate participant engagement
Inspire participants to pursue careers in research and science education
More outreach as you have "empowered" (I "robustly" hate that word) educators at the home institution to incorporate activities into their instruction.-WDA

8. Implementing Chapter Outreach for Diverse Populations

9. Acknowledgements William D. Atchison, Ph.D. Robert Ross, Ph.D.
Michigan Chapter SfN
Thomas Fischer, Ph.D.
Martin Burg, Ph.D.
Shane Perrine, Ph.D.
Ginett Colón- Web design
The many volunteers, presenters, and participants
R25NS, NSF REU, NINDS ENDURE