K–12 Outreach
April 2026
Exhibitor, STEAM day 2026 (20 middle school age students), Project BrainLight, University of Delaware, 4/23/2026.
Exhibitor, STEAM Week (3rd, 4th, and 5th graders), Four Youth, 4/8/2026.
January–April 2026
Co-Lead, Catalyzing AI Challenge Teams in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Recruited 3 teams and organized 4 sessions for the Presidential AI Challenge. One team was Delware state champions!
October 17th, 2025
Presenter, Newark Charter School (Engineering Pathway at High School)
September 9th, 2024
While well beyond K-12, I presented my research in AI to the Jenner’s Pond Retirement Community, which is geographically near UD and the home of many retired faculty and alumni. My presentation “Looking under the hood at the AI engine” had a packed audience (more than 100 attendees) with engaging discussions.
Summer 2024
I held 10 weekly research discussions over Zoom on mini-projects focused on “Brain+AI” with three 11th-grade students and their guardians.
April 9th, 2024
In our third STEAM Day event with A.I. duPont Middle School students, César, Alex, Austin Meek, and I combined forces with ECE’s Professor Fouad Kiamilev. Students made shocking discoveries about the STEM careers!
July 7th, 2023
CNIEL road show. Alex, Justin, Isabel, and I were invited to develop and present a module in 45-minute sessions for each grade throughout a day as part of “STEAM Day at Thomas Edison Charter School” (K–7th grades) as part of the Four Youth summer program. Along with live demonstrations of a wireless EEG headset and visualization software set-up, we literally sparked interest by having a Tesla coil, wireless communication of audio, investigated static charge, and discussed the capabilities and limitations of neuroimaging and AI to read minds.
April 4th and 5th, 2023
June 23rd, 2022
Alex lead a morning module “Read Someone’s Mind” at the UD ECE summer camp “Make Smart Stuff”. The module covered brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence (AI), and the intersection between those technologies and ECE.
June 7th, 2022
Alex and César volunteered at our exhibit “What do the electric waves in your brain tell us?” during STEAM Day organized by Project Brain Light. There were 55 seventh grade students in attendance at this event from A.I. duPont Middle School in Wilmington, Delaware. For the event, César made an illustrative handout.
2021
Neural Engineering Community Award
2020
Trevor Trevor, ECE undergraduate student, and I (along with other volunteers) hosted a lunchtime activity booth at the “Engineering Your Tomorrow” event held at Delaware Tech Community College in Georgetown, DE. The Sussex County STEM Alliance organized this outreach event with the purpose “to expose, mentor and teach our County’s diverse young girls the basic fundamentals of science and engineering through high interest STEM activities, while showing them… “STEM IS FUN”. After helping with the entomology experiments in the morning, I set up the booth that showcased ECE’s critical role in biomedical engineering with a live demonstration and interactive handouts. Thanks to UD’s Erin Sparks for inviting us to this event.
2019
We joined UD’s Women in Engineering outreach program at a local New Castle Middle School, Serviam Girls Academy, whose mission is to take girls from low-income houses and give them the education they need to succeed in high school and beyond. Working with Trevor Foresta, ECE undergraduate student and Julia Schneider, a post-doctoral researcher from the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences, we developed a module showing ECE’s critical role in neuroimaging technology and analysis for their enrichment program during their enrichment hour (4-5 pm on Wednesday). Julia provided slides and enthusiasm on current and past sensors and systems to measure the brains operation. Trevor assembled and tested the OpenBCI headset while still a first-year engineering student.
