The Science Cafe (“Café Científico”) of the Universidad de La Frontera started its fourth season on May 7, 2019.

What started four years ago as a space for the dissemination of science and knowledge has now turned into a well-established activity of the Universidad de La Frontera that started its fourth season with interesting topics of the world of science.

“This year, we are starting into a new season of this initiative that started in 2016 as a project to communicate science and that was well received by the university community and external people from the beginning. Over these years, a lot of interesting topics for the community have been presented from a scientific point of view and also turned into an opportunity of support for the community.Science plays an important social role that is not always visible and during the past three years, the Science Cafe of our university allowed thousands of people to participate in science and to be part of science, as well as for the university to show the community which is our scientific contribution,” said Dr. Alex Seguel, who is the director of the Office of Student Development at the Universidad de La Frontera and who started this initiative.

Since the first session of the Science Cafe, some of the topics were natural hazards, cancer treatment, the conservation of the Araucaria, functional foods, adolescent depression, male infertility, the medical use of cannabis and much more. Over 2500 people have been participating and refuted the myth that the community is not interested in science and technology.

For this year’s season, Dr. Seguel commented: “We have a high commitment with the community and that is why we want to include topics that are interesting for them, for example mental health, diversity, sexual and reproductive health, bullying and cyberbullying, physical activity and cardiovascular health, etc. Our goal is to contribute through the Science Cafe to the inclusion, well-being, and health promotion and prevention of our students and the community, within the current contexts of the university.”

LIVE STREAM AND COOPERATION

Each session of the Science Cafe has been and will be transmitted via live stream by UfroMedios, a media network of the Universidad de La Frontera, in order to expand the audience and to provide access to the ones who are not able to attend the sessions, that take place once a month, in person.

This year, the Science Cafe counts with the support of two science-focused student groups: Sociebio and Interlab. Both groups are part of the Faculty of Agricultural and Forestry Science.

FIRST SCIENCE CAFE SESSION 2019

The first session of the Science Cafe season 2019 was about “Neurodiversity: Just a trend or real?”. It was organized by BIOREN-UFRO and the UFRO Office of Student Development.

The speakers were Dr. Sandra Venegas Gonzalez, an academic at the UFRO Department for Mental Health and Psychiatry, and Dr. Belgica Vasquez, the president of the Inclusive Association and a visiting professor of the Doctoral Program in Morphological Science of the UFRO.

The audience was able to get to know more details about neurodiversity, which is a discipline that proposes that the differences of the brains of individuals are not more than just differences. According to the theory, conditions such as the attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder or the autism spectrum disorder are not “abnormalities”, but simply differences of the brain.

The next session of the Science Cafe will take place on July 4, 2019, and will be transmitted via live stream on: cafecientifico.ufro.cl, where you can also find the streams of some of the previous sessions.

Written by: UFRO Communications Office
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