In a spirited effort to empower the next generation of young scientists, we organized an motivating Girls’ Day event. We invited 18 girls from their school to experience life as scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

The day kicked off with hands-on lab work, where the girls conducted an immunodiffusion experiment, sparking their curiosity and excitement for science. Followed by an interactive presentation on the immune system, fostering a deeper understanding of its functions and how it keeps us from dying every minute of our life.

A highlight of the day was meeting Professor Nicole Strittmatter, who shared first insights in her research and inspired the kids with her career journey as a professor in STEM. A fun “Immune System vs. Pathogen” game helped memorizing everything we learned throughout the day.

This event left an indelible mark on the girls, igniting their interest in STEM and illustrating the boundless opportunities awaiting them in the scientific world. We were proud to see the positive impact we had on the day to promote more future women in STEM and personally helped to make a difficult decision a bit easier.

The immune system is often a overlooked topic in the German compulsory education. Therefore, we reached out to our former schools and offered a 90-minute science talk about it. In cooperation with the Wittekind-Gymnasium Lübbecke, we gladly subsidized a regular lecture with our popular science talk in senior classes. Instead of a monotonous lecture, we shared our experience on studying life science, played a quiz with the pupils and answer their questions alongside the immunology talk. It was nice to see how we sparked some of the pupil’s interest in our immune system, as well as the fascinating aspects of life sciences.

The key for successful science communication is to establish a meaningful dialogue with the public. This is why we did not only focus on visualizing the paths of our immune system by exhibiting images, but we also organized popular scientific talks accessible for everyone in our “Immunology Café” – Charlie & Lars. We offered four expert talks on various bioscientific topics – giving insights into immunological research, neurodegenerative diseases and genetic engineering over a nice Saturday breakfast. With over 50 guests in the “Immunology Café”, we inspired several critical discussions in an open dialogue – a great success for science communication!

Our first speaker, Dr. Obst, an LMU group leader expert on T-cell responses interactively engaged with the audience to depict the communication between innate and adaptive immune system. His opening talk was thus perfectly aligned with the core messages of our art exhibition. Dr. Obst really highlighted how each and every one of us depends on immunological discoveries such as vaccinations, cell therapies as well as organ transplantations. Thus, he was able to dispel many of the audience’s half-truths and myths in our immune response and allay their fears.

A captivating impression on Alzheimer’s disease and today’s research on therapies was provided by Prof. Dr. Stefan Lichtenthaler from DZNE Munich. He drew attention to the enormous number of people in our society affected by neurodegenerative diseases: more than 50 million people worldwide suffer from Alzheimer’s disease – from disorientation as well as severe memory loss. His discourse illustrated the urgent need for advancing treatments amidst this pandemic of neurodegenerative diseases. The audience was very touched, as some of the guests had experienced Alzheimer’s in their own families and were grateful for the hope that Stefan Lichtenthaler gave them as an expert in this field.

Dr. Grigory Tagiltsev, a structural scientist at the MPI for Biochemistry, showed absolutely spectacular images and models of our cell’s cytoskeleton, motor proteins and the cell’s power supply - ATPases. He provided a snapshot of the hidden world of our cells: guests were able to dive into the complex pathways and fascinating tasks that our cells perform every moment of every day.

At last, we welcomed Liliana Pedro, a PhD student from DZNE Munich, who was very enthusiastic about science communication. She engaged in a heated and exciting debate with our audience about genome engineering: By pointing out the consequences of CRIPSR Cas usage on Chinese babies, she underlined possible dangers intertwined with scientific endeavors. The audience realized that setting up ethical measures is critical to avoid misuse of innovative techniques – and that everyone in our society has a right to participate in bioethical decisions. Again, the importance of science communication was highlighted since knowledge about today’s research is the absolute basis for entering into such a dialogue. Looking forward, there is much work to be done to advance the efforts in science communication, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that every individual can participate and contribute to setting the bioethical standards of the future.

Our content is carefully designed to break down the complex topics of immunology into easier digestible posts. We lead the viewer on a journey through the immune system from the start of the response over the innate and especially adaptive immune system. We have three different overarching themes: General immunology, methods in the lab and immunology naming fun facts. Two main ideas underlie the entire concept: We want to make the content fun and digestible, but also very accurate and full of information. Our final blend of cartoon images and descriptive captions accomplishes exactly that. We even managed to include real scientific articles into our posts. For reaching more curious people wanting to do immunology in the future, we reposted our posts on the stories of @gobiochem of the TU that reaches motivated school children.

In our quiz game, kids will work as either the pathogen or immune system team to complete for points. They will answer questions and complete interactive challenges, like finding tools to kill germs in a room. The team that gains the required sum of points wins the tournament.