Brainbee 2025

This is the second year that I’m involved in the Dutch version of the Brainbee or ‘Hersenolympiade’. This is an exciting international competition for high school students to get a glimpse of the broad field of the Neurosciences. Which of course is not taught in high schools as a separate topic, but instead incoporated in Biology.

Before the day itself I volunteered by co-leading the Academic Team of the Brainbee. This is a group of volunteers, mostly PhD and Master’s students, that engineer, select and assess the questions that we ask the participants on a national Brainbee day.

This year we organized the Brainbee on Sunday 16th of March at the Huygens building of the Donders Institute (Radboud University) in Nijmegen. Together with co-organizer Fleur Zeldenrust, I travelled to Nijmegen from Amsterdam in the early morning. After setting things up we had a bunch of fun lectures, practicals and even a key-note speaker for all the participants.

In between the many activities the high school students participated in different rounds of the Brainbee quiz: (1) a multiple choice round on multiple aspects of neuroscience, (2) a patient diagnosis round in which the students had to link a story of a person with a brain disorder to the name of this disorder, and (3) an anatomy round, in which students had to identify brain structures.

After the scores from these three rounds were in, we moved on to the final round! In the grand finale, we ask questions and students need to immediately provide the answer. In a knock-out competition, the smartest students pass on after each sub-round within the finale. Eventually we obtained three winners! The #1 Luca will represent the Netherlands in the International Competition of the Brainbee in November. The top three finalist received a Neuroscience textbook (expensive stuff these days..) and are invited at this year’s Dutch Neuroscience Meeting.