Tulane programs reach thousands of community members across New Orleans
Photo by: Cheryl Gerber
Neuroscientist Elizabeth Engler-Chiurazzi has coined a phrase describing what she believes scientists owe the communities they serve: neuroscience philanthropy. Since arriving at Tulane in 2020 as both a researcher and the Tulane Brain Institute’s director of community outreach, she has reached thousands through her programs.
“It’s not enough as scientists to come in and drop some knowledge on a person and then walk away,” she said. “We owe it to our community to address the issues they face, the barriers and challenges, in order to move the field forward.”
Engler-Chiurazzi joined Tulane to start a laboratory studying how the nervous system and the immune system interact across the lifespan. “These two systems cannot be considered by themselves,” she said. “You have to understand what is going on in one if we’re going to fully understand what’s going on in the other.”
In addition to the value of her research, Brain Institute leadership recognized Engler-Chiurazzi’s long history of taking neuroscience to the public. They asked her to lead the institute’s community outreach. She had been doing neuroscience outreach since 2006, when she was an undergraduate at Arizona State giving talks to high school classes. The work continued at West Virginia University, where she completed her postdoctoral training, and in 2019 she was named an If/Then Ambassador by the American Association for the Advancement of Science — a program designed to highlight female role models in STEM careers.
Life-sized orange statues of the ambassadors, including Engler-Chiurazzi, were exhibited at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
Engler-Chiurazzi oversees a wide range of outreach programs at Tulane, each designed to meet a different community need. For example, Books and Brains, a signature outreach initiative, provides children’s neuroscience books to local libraries, free lending libraries, and at events.
“That program was inspired by my daughter, who wanted to learn more about science at her library at school,” she said. “For many kids, either in rural or under-resourced urban communities, access to neuroscience content is really restricted. There weren’t a lot of books about the brain available. I certainly never learned about neuroscience until I got to college, and by 29, I had a PhD in the subject. That’s not a lot of time to go from completely naive to expert.”
Reaching adults in moments of need is another priority. Engler-Chiurazzi also oversees a brain-disease patient support program, funded by the Michael Cochran Community Engagement Endowed Fund, in which undergraduate volunteers visit local hospitals to read, color, play music, or simply keep patients of strokes and other neurological conditions company.
The work happens in classrooms, too. The Brain Institute collaborates with Tulane’s K-12 STEM Education Center to teach neuroscience using hands-on activities, such as shaping brain lobes out of Play-Doh, building neurons from pipe cleaners and holding real sheep brains. The institute also participates in neurological disease walks such as the Alzheimer’s walk, where faculty wear name badges identifying themselves as researchers, inviting families to ask questions.
Another facet of the outreach focuses on diversifying clinical trial recruitment, a critical issue, she said, because trials need to represent the populations they serve.
For Engler-Chiurazzi, the future of neuroscience depends not only on discovery in the lab, but on building trust, opportunity and connection beyond it. She said Tulane has supported community outreach in ways unmatched elsewhere in her career.
“Tulane is the institution that has put more support and backing — practical, financial, and from a deep, meaningful values perspective — than any place I’ve worked. The Brain Institute is really special in that. I would not have been able to do as many things nor had as much of an impact without that backing and support.”
