‘Your Brain On Bugs’ Booth, Atlanta Science Festival 2022

The Forger Lab presented their CBN sponsored booth “Your Brain On Bugs” at the Atlanta Science Festival Expo this year. The booth was used to educate the public about the contributions of the microbiota to brain development, highlighting our own research at GSU. We had a blast! Attendees lined up to participate in our hands-on activity, in which we demonstrated the arrival of microbes to the gut at birth by using a model (built in-house) of a newborn baby.

View of our booth at Piedmont Park at the 2022 Atlanta Science Festival.
Atlanta Science Festival 2022
The ‘Your Brain On Bugs’ team showing two of the props used in the activity: a model of a newborn baby and a short quiz.
Children interacting with the newborn baby model. The goal was to insert microbes (made out of pom poms by our trainees) through the entrance (mouth) of the digestive tract of the baby. This modeled how the microbiota arrives and populates the newborn’s gut. The demonstration was followed by an explanation of how these microbes living in the gut exert effects on the brain.