High School Freshman Named as NEOMED Brain Bee Champion

High school students from across the state of Ohio gathered at Northeast Ohio Medical University, Saturday, Jan. 25, for the sixth annual NEOMED Regional Brain Bee Competition.

Nilla Rajan, a freshman at Dublin Jerome High School in in Dublin, Ohio, was crowned as the winner of the neuroscience competition. She will move on to the 2020 USA Brain Bee Championship being held for the first time on the NEOMED campus. The national Bee is scheduled to take place March 27-29.

In each of the past three years, the winner of NEOMED’s Regional Brain Bee finished in the top five at the national competition.

Brain Bee competitions test students’ knowledge of neuroscience topics such as intelligence, emotions, memory, sleep, vision, hearing and sensations. Students are also quizzed on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s; other illnesses, such as stroke, schizophrenia, epilepsy and depression; and addictions. A final category, brain research, is an area in which NEOMED collaborates with Kent State’s Brain Health Research Institute.

The competition consists of a written exam and an oral quiz, where students write their answers on white boards before revealing them to a panel of judges and scorekeepers.

Four local neuroscience experts served as the judges for NEOMED’s Regional Brain Bee:

• Wilson Chung, Ph.D., of Kent State University’s Brain Health Research Institute
• Michael Lehman, Ph.D., of Kent State University’s Brain Health Research Institute
• Yong Lu, Ph.D., a NEOMED associate professor of neurobiology and course director for medical neuroscience
• Matthew Smith, Ph.D., a NEOMED assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and associate director of the University’s Integrated Pharmaceutical Medicine (IPM) program