NeuWriteSD celebrates “NeuYears”!

Posted by neuwritesandiego on January 3, 2019 in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

As we begin a new year for NeuWriteSD, we’d like to reflect on our progress in 2018, as well as some of our goals (or “NeuYears Resolutions”, if you will) for 2019!

NeuWriteSD celebrates 5 years

2018 marked the 5-year anniversary of NeuWriteSD’s official founding by members of the UCSD Neurosciences Graduate Program back in 2013! Our readership has grown steadily, and 2018 was our biggest year yet!

While all of the original founders of NeuWriteSD have gone on to bigger and better things (some even in science writing!), we continue to have a strong core membership, enabling us to continually publish new blog posts every single week. Some of our most popular posts written in the last year include:

• Conscious in Dreamland: The Neuroscience of Lucid Dreaming by Barbara Spencer
• The Neuroscience of Laughter by Susan Lubejko
• The Science of Stuttering by Catie Profaci
• Zika: Predicting the long-term effects of an unrelenting virus by Samantha Jones
• The Rise and Fall of Genetic Memory by James Howe

Interestingly, our international readership showed a particularly dramatic increase in 2018! We’re excited that people across the globe are reading our work, and we’re hopeful that this trend will continue!

In addition to publishing our weekly blog posts, during 2018 we also:

• Hosted a workshop (led by Dr. Heather Buschman) on how to pitch stories to potential publishers
• Printed two new editions (spring and fall) of The NeuWrite Times  
• Presented a poster at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting in San Diego

“NeuYears Resolutions” for 2019

We’ve got lots of goals for the new year! For instance, we are hoping to create a team of Spanish translators so that we can increase the number of our articles that are translated into Spanish – hopefully to the point that every post is available in both languages. We have noticed that many of our Spanish-translated articles (such as ¿Dos Cerebros en una Cabeza?) are among are most-viewed posts, so we are hoping that offering more translated articles will allow our writing to reach an even broader audience. We will also publish this year’s edition of The NeuWrite Times in both English and Spanish and distribute them at a variety of events around San Diego.

We’ll also be helping to sponsor a science storytelling event happening at UCSD’s The Loft on Friday, March 1st 6:30-8:30pm! If you’d like to tell your story broadly related to the theme “Well, that was weird”, submit your pitches here by January 14th!

Finally, in the coming months we’ll be freshening up our website and unveiling a new look with a new (but familiar) logo! Here’s a preview…

If there are any brain-related topics you’d especially like us to cover, comment below, email us at neuwritesd@gmail.com, reach us through our Facebook page or tweet at us @NeuWriteSD! Happy NeuYear!