‘A day at an MRI research institute’ - this was the Erwin L. Hahn Institute’s title of the programme item for the 2024 Girls' Day, which invited interested eighth and ninth grade schoolgirls to get a taste of science.

Girls' Day (and the parallel Boys' Day) is a national event that has been encouraging young people for many years to spend a day immersing themselves in a professional world that is usually occupied by the opposite gender.

There was a great deal of interest and the ten slots at ELH were filled within a few days.

What do we actually do at the ELH? How does an MRI work, why do we build our own coils and how do you set up a scientific study? For four hours on 25 April 2024, everything revolved around precisely these questions. While Dr Stephanie Antons from Prof. Dr Matthias Brand's research group vividly explained why and how ultra-high-field MRI can be used to research behavioural addictions and how to actually build a hypothesis, medical student and medical technician Annika Verheyen explained the structure of an MRI and how 3D technology is used to build coils.

The students were then allowed to fill out a typical questionnaire for a study themselves before heading to the centrepiece of the ELH - the 7 Tesla scanner. There, Pia Musebrink from the Department of General Psychology: Cognition lay down in the MRI scanner for a short functional measurement.

The schoolgirls, some of whom had travelled from all over the Ruhr region to take part in Girls' Day at the ELH, were very interested and asked lots of exceptionally good questions.

We hope that we were able to give you a good insight into everyday life at a research institute and that one or two of you were inspired to go into research. Because one thing is for sure: science can make good use of you. Go for it!