The Hersenolympiade Nederland Foundation aims to promote interest in and knowledge about neuroscience among students and their family and peers by providing teaching materials and organizing the Brain Olympiad. In view of the major social impact of brain disorders and the role of cognition in, for example, self-learning systems, the Hersenolympiade Nederland Foundation believes it is of the utmost importance to bring students into contact with the fascinating world of neuroscience and cognition at an early age (and not wait until a later university course).

The Hersenolympiade Nederland Foundation is part of the International Brain Bee as national coordinator, and organizes the Brain Olympiad as the national preliminary round of the international Brain Bee competition. The foundation aims to send the winner of the Dutch Brain Olympiad annually as a participant in the IBB competition.

For more information about the Brain Olympiad, please contact the Netherlands Brain Olympiad Foundation here .

ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL BRAIN BEE

The IBB is an organization that has been organizing knowledge competitions in the field of neuroscience  since the end of the 1990s in the US. The competition has been organized internationally since 2009, preferably simultaneously with an international conference in the field of neuroscience. More than 50 countries are currently participating, each organizing a national preliminary round (sometimes several local preliminary rounds, depending on the number of students enrolling) and sending their winners to the international finals.

The competition consists of different parts spread over several days: a multiple-choice knowledge test, a neuroanatomical practicum, a clinical part in which the participants diagnose patients on the basis of videos and a jury part in which leading neuroscientists ask open questions to the participants.

Since 2018, a number of international Neuroscience organizations (including the Federation of European Neurosciences, the International Brain Research Organization and the Society for Neuroscience) have joined the IBB and the competition is being expanded internationally. One of the other “founding partners” is the DANA alliance, an organization that, among other things, stimulates knowledge about the brain through the annual organization of  the ‘Brain Awareness Week’ (BAW). This is one of the reasons why the Brain Olympiad was organized during BAW in 2019. This video explains what Brain Awareness Week is, and why a focus on brain research is so important.

LEGAL FORM

The Hersenolympiade Nederland Foundation is registered in the register of the Chamber of Commerce, and is a “Algemeen Nut Beogende Instelling”. See here for the public documents (accessible with the password “anbi”)