Rewiring Neuroscience Education: Emerging Trends and Technologies

This project aims to serve the national interest by facilitating conference sessions for educators on how to incorporate cutting-edge technologies into neuroscience education, and, in turn, prepare students for the dynamic STEM workforce. The “Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience” is a neuroscientist-run group of educators and scientists dedicated to fostering undergraduate-level neuroscience research and education. The group has been the primary driver of neuroscience curriculum development in the U.S. for the past 35 years, convening national workshops to discuss pedagogical innovations in neuroscience and beyond. The 2026 workshop entitled “Rewiring Neuroscience Education: Analyzing Emerging Trends and Technologies” will promote cross-disciplinary dialogue and explore how emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), can modernize neuroscience education. Attendees will leave with new, directly implementable ideas about how to (a) stimulate students’ appetite for discovery, (b) translate findings into concrete solutions, and (c) expand participation in their classrooms and laboratories, strengthening the next generation of scientists. This conference project includes direct support for attendees, workshop sessions, and published proceedings of the conference. Collectively, these will inform and shape the future of undergraduate neuroscience education and prepare thousands of students for the STEM workforce. The goal of the workshop is to teach educators about cutting-edge technologies and how to incorporate them into the neuroscience curriculum in order to better prepare students for the STEM workforce. The organization has a longstanding tradition of impactful workshops that allow educators to generate solutions to these challenges in a collaborative workshop setting. The 2026 workshop will address the pressing need for incorporating emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data into neuroscience education while remaining grounded in evidence-based pedagogy that is accessible to all interested educators. This workshop’s focus will provide a venue to explore current challenges and the transformative capabilities of these technologies in neuroscience education, so that educators will be equipped with the most current understanding, skills, and tools to ensure that students across the U.S. are competitive in the workforce. The workshop will foster cross-disciplinary dialogue to explore how integrating emerging technologies can expand neuroscience education. This will be accomplished by recruiting two nationally recognized keynote presenters to speak about AI and big data, ensuring broad access to the workshop by providing funds for educators who would otherwise be unable to attend, and providing open access to published proceedings of the workshop. Attendees will leave the workshop with the resources, content knowledge, and pedagogical strategies that directly address the intellectual challenges of educating the next generation of neuroscientists in an era of rapid technological change to better prepare students for the STEM workforce. The NSF IUSE:EDU Program supports conference projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2605997 | Program: 04002627DB NSF STEM Education | Principal Investigator: Margaret Gill | Institution: North Central College, NAPERVILLE, IL | Award Amount: $49,989 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2605997 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2605997.html