I'm Rick Crouse, a fourth year neuroscience graduate student at Yale and the co-president of Yale Student Science Diplomats, an organization dedicated to science communication, outreach, and advocacy. I'm writing this post to spread the word about Science Haven.
Science Haven is a collaboration between two Yale student-led science outreach groups: Yale Student Science Diplomats and Open Labs. We are interested in partnering with community leaders to bring science demonstrations and activities to neighborhood events. In addition to doing cool science activities with local families, Science Haven aims to foster a greater sense of community between scientists and their neighbors.
This summer, we attended community management team meetings around New Haven and brought fun, hands-on science activities to events. Some examples of our activities include extracting DNA from strawberries, spinning on a stool with weights to illustrate angular momentum, throwing items in beakers of water to explain density, and listening to the nerve cells inside a cockroach's leg! We also have some cool temporary tattoos that we give to kids after completing a demo!
If you are hosting an event--we want to bring a table, some scientists, and demos to be part of the fun! If the event has a particular theme, we can do our best to design a related special activity. If you're not having an actual event, we also have access to researchers that have prepared talks about interesting science topics geared for the public, that would love to come to your community center, church, etc. If you're feeling really adventurous, we could host a mini science fair where our graduate students and postdocs bring scientific posters they designed to explain their research to middle schoolers! And if none of this quite fits what you had in mind, let me know and we can figure something out because, more than anything, we want to bring science to where the people are. We want to put a face to the lab coat and hope to foster a sense of trust and communication between New Haven residents and their neighborhood scientific community.
