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UCLA’s Interaxon hosts high school students

By Yancey Cashell and Ariel Hidal

May 24, 2013 5:00 p.m.

Eleventh grade student Nasima Khan presented a year’s worth of research on cerebral palsy to students at UCLA Thursday, before touring the campus she hopes will someday be her own.

Khan and about 60 of her high school peers, who attend Hawthorne Math and Sciences Academy presented to UCLA students about a range of topics in neuroscience from disease to vision and memory functions in Ackerman conference rooms.

Khan said she was nervous when she first began speaking about the brain and cerebral palsy, but she knew the UCLA students would help whenever a student was at a loss for words.

The high school students presented at UCLA and toured its campus as part of an event held by Interaxon, a UCLA undergraduate student group that aims to foster interest in brain research among high school, middle school and elementary school students, said Nehali Mehta, a fourth-year neuroscience student and co-president of Interaxon.

Interaxon has ten visits per quarter with public high schools in Los Angeles County to teach about the brain and provide students with college advice, but this is the first year the group’s funding has allowed them to bring students to UCLA, Mehta said.

Interaxon has worked with the students of Hawthorne Math and Sciences Academy since fall quarter, Mehta said. This is the first time Interaxon has focused on working with one high school the entire year, she added.

Saima Ubaray, a junior in high school who presented on Anton-Babinski syndrome, the denial of one’s own blindness, said she, like Khan, was also initially nervous for her presentation, but the UCLA students helped ease her nerves.

“(The UCLA students) were welcoming with open arms and that made (presenting) really comfortable,” she said.

Interaxon’s outreach programs, such as Thursday’s event, come at a time when science programs at public high schools in the state are suffering from significant underfunding,  said Drumil Bhatt, a third-year neuroscience student and vice president of Interaxon.

“None of the schools (that Interaxon visits) are able to teach a full curriculum in neuroscience,” he said. “We want to be able to help change that.”

Bhatt said he hopes bringing the students to UCLA’s campus will inspire some of them to apply to UCLA in the future.

“Many of these students have little admissions resources available and are unaware that they have a chance of being able to study at a university with research opportunities they would not find at a junior college,” he said

The high school students who visited are all very interested in the sciences, said Akshay Ravi, a third-year physiological sciences student and financial officer of Interaxon. Touring UCLA’s labs is a good chance for them to see a research university, he added.

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