The latest TReND-ADInstruments Scholarship winner: Aderemi Aladeokin

We’d like to congratulate Aderemi Aladeokin, a scientist from Nigeria, on winning the TReND-ADInstruments Scholarship to attend our most recent CrawFly Neurobiology Educators course! The course took place over 5 days in June at Cornell University - an intense, hands-on workshop on teaching integrated neuroscience using invertebrate models in an engaging and inspiring way. 

We’re very proud to be able to work with TReND - a non-profit organization run entirely by volunteer scientists at universities worldwide with the objective of overcoming global inequality in education through local empowerment, and with a focus on tertiary tier Neuroscience. Together, we were able to offer a travel scholarship to a scientist from an African university to attend CrawFly 2014. The scholarship applications for the CrawFly workshop were evaluated by an international panel of scientists working together with the education committee of Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience.

From Aderemi, (pictured center):

At the 2014 CrawFly course, the rigor that is often associated with the learning of neuroscience was very much augmented by the interesting and exciting manner in which the course was presented and taught. My participation in the lab course was highly rewarding as it afforded me the rare privilege of experiencing how cutting-edge research techniques could be translated into amazing tools that can be utilized to bring life to and further reinforce a lot of the challenging topics that tend to pose problems to the understanding of fundamental principles of neuroscience for life science students. The lab course was also an eye-opener to the role(s) which lab classes could play as a veritable platform for developing the interest of undergraduate students in research opportunities - which will no doubt increase the job prospects of these students when they finish school. This lab course was delivered in the serene and beautiful atmosphere of the Ithaca campus of Cornell University and the food was good, these qualities and more also aided in keeping stress and exhaustion away.
For me, the 2014 CrawFly course will further help me in my quest to innovate low-tech but high impact ways that will make both students and my colleagues alike see the fun and excitement in the learning and teaching of neuroscience, not minding the hardline reputation which the discipline has acquired all along in my continent Africa. The co-sponsorship between ADI and TReND really assisted me in defraying a large part of the cost attached to attending this inspirational course. The co-sponsorship allowed me to be a beneficiary of a technology-transfer platform that will further lead to much more fruitful collaborations with the world-class neurobiologists that form the faculty that taught the 2014 CrawFly course. These will definitely culminate in improved research and teaching output as far as neuroscience education in Africa is concerned.

We look forward to working with TReND again in the future, and wish Aderemi luck with his Neuroscience career!