Outreach activities
Discover outreach activities taking place at the Neuroscience Institute.
Event: NeuroFest
Date: 14–15 June 2025
Location: Sheffield Winter Garden
NeuroFest 2025 was a two-day public engagement event designed to bring neuroscience research to a broad audience in a fun, interactive, and accessible way. Held in the Sheffield Winter Garden, the festival welcomed over 700 visitors from across the city and beyond.
The event featured hands-on activities, live demonstrations, and interactive exhibits from across the University. Researchers from medicine, biosciences, engineering, and the social sciences presented their work on brain function, the sensory nervous system, and neurological disease in ways designed to spark curiosity and conversation.
Visitors had the chance to:
- See their own brainwaves using EEG technology
- Build neuron models
- Interact with an AI robot
- Learn how senses like hearing and smell work
- Explore the effects of brain stimulation
- Play a game exploring loneliness and dementia
- Discover links between exercise and motor neuron disease (MND)
Exhibits included an interactive experience from the Marcotti Lab, showing how we hear speech and music and what it feels like to lose the sense of hearing. Children also had the opportunity to build the sensory cells responsible for detecting sound. Melissa Tan and Dr Andrew Lin from the School of Biosciences ran a popular display using fruit flies to demonstrate how the brain processes smells, with hands-on activities involving mutant flies and different odours.
The event successfully brought science into an accessible public space, encouraging engagement across all age groups and contributing to greater public awareness of the University’s neuroscience research.
Read more about the event here.