Marquette Students Author Children’s Book About Neuroscience

In late November, Marquette High senior Ethan George and junior Ayush Vasireddy encountered a different kind of nervousness than they had ever experienced.

It wasn’t quite like preparing for a speech and debate tournament or studying for an especially difficult exam. It was the unique anticipation associated with presenting their new children’s book to a gym full of Green Pines Elementary students and keeping them entertained the whole time.

“You’re presenting in front of little kids. What’s the worst that could happen?” George said, with a laugh.

The two students borrowed lab coats from their teacher, Dr. Cathy Farrar, to look the part of scientists and made model neurons and synapses out of stretchy objects for the Green Pines students to utilize as George and Vasireddy drove home the concepts of their debut children’s book, “Brain Power in Action: The Championship Game.”

“These kids really thought of us as the coolest people possible. They wanted to be like us,” Vasireddy said. “It was a really cool experience to get those kids engaged and see how their brains work.”

“We go through 13 years of Rockwood education and seeing where that all starts, giving these students these concepts and the same education I went through, was so rewarding,” George added.

George and Vasireddy started working on “Brain Power in Action” last January out of a desire to help make complicated neuroscience concepts easier to grasp for early elementary students. They published a Kindle version of the book this past September, and it was Amazon’s top new release in Children’s Biology Books that month.

They are currently in the process of creating a paperback version of the book and hope to gain distribution for the book in St. Louis County Library branches as well as school libraries.

Along the way, they have partnered with Dr. Dong Xu and the University of Missouri Digital Biology Laboratory as well as earning a grant from AIforUs. Green Pines classroom assistant Katelyn Gettis helped connect the authors with the students for their November readaloud.

“The biggest challenge for both of us was this is our youngest reading audience. We can’t use scientific jargon and have to make sure what we’re saying is actually making sense to these kids,” George said. “The biggest thing is keeping them involved. So it was really just making activities that appealed to their age and also writing in a way with that same type of rhetoric.”

“Brain Power in Action” tells the story of Raj as he prepares for a big basketball game. The book discusses the intersection between sports and neuroscience and explores the brain’s role in attention and teamwork, incorporating brain structures such as the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and amygdala and neuroscience concepts such as how the brain responds to positive experiences with mood elevators such as dopamine and oxytocin.

George and Vasireddy have collaborated on research projects throughout their time at Marquette, both in the school’s Authentic Science Research course and through independent opportunities around the area.

“Getting into biology research helped me learn how even changes at the microscopic level can make such huge impacts in scientific discovery,” Vasireddy said. “After my passion was gained for biology, I learned more about neuroscience, about the brain and how each function of each part of the brain really works together in how we do our daily processes. That really fascinates me and got me interested in neuroscience, seeing how each part of the brain works together.”

The two have connected over their interest in biology and how to convey complicated concepts in ways that everyone can understand. They are even in the process of creating a follow-up to “Brain Power in Action.”

“We make such great medicines and understand so much about all these great molecules. But the biggest problem is these patients don’t have the knowledge or medical literacy to comprehend that,” George said. “Even if we have all this great evidence, if it’s not made tangible, we lose that. My goal as an aspiring physician is to break that tangle and allow patients to be more conceptually aware of what’s going on.”