Chicago B3 Lab
Outreach & Community Science¶
Basic neuroscience and community engagement are not separate activities — they are inseparable parts of the B3 Lab's mission. We do research with communities, not on them.
Citizen Neuroscience Program¶
Science literacy and access to scientific careers depend on exposure to real research, starting early. The B3 Citizen Neuroscience Program partners with middle and high schools in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood to bring pollinator neuroscience into classrooms and communities.
How it works:
Students receive brief training in insect observation and video recording.
They record behavioral videos of insects at local field sites and upload them to a public repository.
Lab members characterize the behavioral suites in these videos and match them to brain imaging data.
QR codes at field sites link passers-by to the resulting brain images and behavioral descriptions — connecting sidewalk to synapse.
The program currently runs at several Bronzeville-area schools and will expand with NSF CAREER support to additional sites across the South Side.
Record → Upload → Discover the brain behind the behavior
Bronzeville Urban Ecology Partnership¶
Bronzeville · Chicago's South Side · Environmental Justice
Bronzeville — Chicago’s historic “Black Metropolis” — contains an abandoned elevated rail corridor slated for green infrastructure redevelopment. The corridor also sits adjacent to industrial legacy sites with elevated PFAS, lead, heavy metals, and asbestos.
We are working with local community organizations, the State of Illinois, and IIT Landscape Architecture faculty to:
Map contamination levels across 14 corridor transect sections
Assess impacts on insect, bird, and tree species richness
Monitor pollinator community response to contamination gradients
Inform remediation priorities and green corridor design
This work operates from an explicit environmental justice framework: communities that have historically borne the highest pollution burden deserve both the best scientific data and a direct role in interpreting it.
Family Fun Days & Public Demos¶
B3 Lab members participate in IIT’s regular Family Fun Days and public science events, bringing live bees, brain imaging data, and hands-on demos to audiences of all ages and backgrounds. If you are interested in hosting us at a community event, school, or museum, please get in touch.
IIT Field Sites¶
An eighth-acre farm site on campus where we maintain hives, run behavioral assays, and deploy AutoPollS camera stations for long-term pollinator community monitoring.
A quarter-acre prairie restoration plot adjacent to the farm, seeded with native Illinois species. Active site for plant–pollinator interaction studies and contamination–biodiversity correlation work.
Urban transect study site on Chicago’s South Side, with 14 sampling sections spanning contamination gradients. Community partnerships guide site access and data interpretation.
Honeybee (Apis mellifera) hives maintained near the IIT campus provide field-exposed colonies for residue analysis and behavioral comparison with lab-reared bumblebees.
Open Science¶
All behavioral rig designs, firmware, analysis code, and (where possible) raw data from B3 Lab projects are published openly on GitHub. Reproducible, accessible science is a core lab value.
Code, hardware designs, and data repositories.
Full documentation for the open-source camera trap platform.
Step-by-step lab protocols published on protocols.io.