A few weeks ago, some students went to Rockefeller University to attend an annual neuroscience talk. This year, Professor Darnell gave a fascinating talk about how our brains work, how we remember things, innovations that could lead to possessive outcomes with Alzheimer’s patients, and clinical cases resulting from specific brain malfunctions. 

Professor Darnelle is an American neuro-oncologist and neuroscientist, the founding director and former CEO of the New York Genome Center, the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor of Cancer Biology at Rockefeller University, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research revolves around RNA and rare autoimmune brain diseases and is credited to have lead to the invention of the HITS-CLIP method to study RNA regulation. 

The captivating and informative talk was followed by a Q&A session, lunch, and then the students were able to move around the building to visit neuroscience-related learning stations. These stations ranged from coloring brain hats, to brain scans, to videos of clinical medicine tested on mice. The experience was educational as the group learned so much about memory and neuroscience in general but also so much fun decorating brain hats and enjoying the activities.