One primary way our team spread awareness of our efforts to tackle rapid detection of mTBI was by having our project featured in several news articles. These articles included the following:
Although these articles were meant to help educate the public about our team's project, we learned some interesting things along the way as well. For example, while speaking to one of the journalists about our project, she revealed that she recently got a concussion from hitting her head on a cabinet, which made the iGEM story particularly personal for her. Her accounts of the incident further underscored our previous research of how dubious a concussion diagnosis can really be, especially if the patient wasn’t certain they were experiencing symptoms until hours, or even days, after the incident.
Furthermore, we have also had the opportunity to engage in science communication with the academic community. From the beginning, UO's Knight Campus researchers have always been an eager audience to our developing project, and it was their keen insights that steered us in enlightening directions. This makes us all the more excited for our presentation for The upcoming Human Performance Alliance meeting on the 19th of October. The Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance is a multi-institute initiative aiming to improve our understanding of human health and performance through research innovations. We are particularly looking forward to this opportunity, because we know the constructive feedback from the leaders in the field of human performance will be invaluable to our project design and presentation. We are looking forward to sharing what we have learned from this feedback in the Jamboree.