Seattle — The journey that began in Seattle took Allen Institute scientists to the African country of Rwanda.
Saskia de Vries and Michael Buys from the Allen Institute visited Africa as part of the TReND CaMinA program, which teaches the fundamentals of computational neuroscience and machine learning to African students.
“Sharing our research and our tools and putting them in other people's hands to see what they can do makes our research stronger, and that's part of our mission,” said Michael Buis, an associate scholar at the Allen Institute.
“All of the science we were doing in this course was computational analysis, so while labs around us are doing experiments and collecting data, what we're sharing with them is data that's been collected from experiments that have already been done, and they're analyzing that data, extracting knowledge, extracting meaning from that data,” said Saskia de Vries, associate director for data and outreach at the Allen Institute.
The program attracts students from a variety of backgrounds from across Africa.
“Some were specifically interested in neuroscience, others in biological sciences in general, and they had a range of education levels, including women who had just graduated from high school,” Buis said.
The program also aims to teach students how to work with this particular data.
“I think it's also really important to understand that different people have different types of questions, and that the data we were working with were primarily survey data. They're not based on a single hypothesis, but they're broad data that allow you to ask many questions, and the questions they're interested in may be different to the questions we're interested in,” de Vries said.
The goal is to diversify neuroscience, support local students interested in STEM, and increase accessibility to science by bringing it to communities that have historically faced barriers to access.
“I think a big part of what science in general, and science means to the Allen Institute, is community engagement,” Buis said.