Founder's Message

When I co-founded my school’s neuroscience club at the end of 9th grade, I learned how hard it was to start something from scratch: it’s very hard to create enough meaningful activities to engage a number of students. The solution that eventually worked was a chain of people at all different experience levels, each volunteering just a bit of their time to educate the next rung down on the experience ladder and to pull them up one rung. To elaborate, I was fortunate to belong to a Stanford-sponsored Neuroscience journal club, and this allowed me to invite research neuroscientists I had met to give talks to my school’s neuroscience club. This generated enough student excitement in research that we started an activity for the more senior students to mentor the younger students through writing review articles for high school research journals. An effective study group for competing in the national USA Brain Bee was set-up, and we expanded our club’s reach locally by funding and volunteering to perform sheep brain dissections for 6th graders at a lesser-resourced middle school in our area. 

At this volunteer event, the supervising school’s teacher pulled me aside briefly and informed me that a couple of the kids didn’t speak English and wouldn’t be able to understand the lessons. I was astonished to hear this and wondered how students in these situations could be helped to overcome these barriers and could be empowered to learn, develop, and pursue their own interests despite such obstacles, and we did what we could that day to help these students in their own language. At this moment my idea for creating the NeuroBeacon Foundation was formed - the idea to create a network of people (mostly students) helping each other learn the excitement of Cognitive Science and Neuroscience, and using technology to leverage or amplify (but not the replace) the impact that each volunteer could have and the number of other young aspiring students they could educate and inspire.

The initial founding concept of NeuroBeacon was to form an extended national-level Cognitive Science club high schoolers could join to both learn and also to volunteer to educate, by either learning through our resources, (ii) using the NeuroBeacon resources as a template to start a CogSci/Neuroscience club at their own schools, (ii) to contribute back rich educational resources that others could tap into, or to (iii) volunteer to educate at lesser resourced school than their own by “adopting” a school to volunteer at, especially those coming from elite or accelerated school environments. With this as the basic founding vision, I felt I could create a national community that would help each other learn the excitement of cognitive and neuroscience, starting with a basic understanding of the brain and human behavior, and progressing to reading and understanding research in this exciting area. The impact is that this education would be available to anyone and to a much broader audience including students at any school no matter how over or under-resourced, and span from introductory to understanding complex research.

My hope for the future of NeuroBeacon includes additional ambitions: (1) I would love to find legitimate ways that high school students can participate in real novel research in the field. (2) I would like to address the topic of how we can beneficially integrate AI into the educational system: secondary schools have rejected generative-AI for valid reasons (it’s a learning crutch and can be used to do work for a student), but I think gen-AI presents the largest learning opportunity ever  - imagine an ideal tutor on every subject practically free. But we need to understand how to best harness this new resource. Further, I think there are huge opportunities to use Gen-AI to expand learning to a number of disabilities that have previously been held back. These are my ideas for the future of the NeuroBeacon Foundation. 

I hope that you may be inspired to join us at the NeuroBeacon Foundation and take advantage of our learning opportunities and  - if you feel inspired - to help us in volunteering to create learning experiences for others.

Sincerely,

Danielle Steinbach

Danielle Steinbach

Founder & President

The NeuroBeacon Foundation