Funny Brains Recap: Science Comedy at FRM 2025
02 July 2025
FENS News, Neuroscience News
From 16-19 June, the 2025 FENS Regional Meeting (FRM 2025) took place in Oslo, Norway, with record-breaking attendance. During the meeting, the FENS Communications Committee hosted its second Funny Brains Workshop in person, led by Dr John Butler (TU Dublin), Michele Marini (Agenda 17), and Dr Rebecca Ellis (Swansea University).
The Funny Brains Event spanned two days, starting with an in-person workshop attended on Day 1 of the FRM, attended by around 60 participants. During the workshop, John, Michele, and Rebecca presented their experiences in comedy science communication and discussed the benefits of using humour to convey scientific concepts. The participants brainstormed their own comedy routines in small groups, with the organisers providing guidance and feedback.
On Day 2 of the meeting, John, Michele, and Rebecca helped ten researchers polish their nine acts before they made their comedy neuroscience debuts in front of an audience of over 100 people at the Young Researchers’ Social Event.
The line-up featured:
1. Öyküm Kaplan Arabaci, performing a routine on her work with baby chickens.
2. Francisco Torres Torres, with his routine on inducing cells strokes through food and oxygen deprivation.
3. Giuliano Didio, who talked about giving cocaine to mice as part of his research on addiction. (He worries he might be breaking bad, making him the “Mice-enberg” of brain research.)
4. Mateo Bastidas Betancourt and Lidiia Tynianskaia, who discussed their co-authored work on the smooth brains of marmosets (and how it definitely doesn’t matter who the first-first co-author is – but it’s Lidiia).
5. Varsha Ramakrishna, who talked about restoring vision, and how, thanks to her research, lab mice are finally “seeing the light.”
6. Domonkos Nagy-Herczeg, who fired off a series of phosphorescent one-liners.
7. Boldizsár Zsolt Balog, who delivered a set of “a cell walks into a bar” jokes.
8. Cem Karakus, who talked about seducing cells before bringing them into a dark room to study them.
9. Taylor Barda, who riffed on the rat population of Norway and the development of brains in preterm babies.
The final act of the night was delivered by Rebecca Ellis, who performed a poem dismantling the infamous, insidious, and debunked paper linking autism to vaccines – equal parts moving, funny, and fierce.
A big thank you to all who joined, and we hope to see you at FENS 2026 in Barcelona for more science comedy fun!