NeuroYouth founder Jamie Kwon and managing director Catherine Enriquez, both high school seniors at Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, are creating opportunities to empower Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) youth to conduct brain and mental health research.
Established in 2023, NeuroYouth is a free youth-led organization hosted by Cornerstone Medical Services (CMS). CMS is a free clinic in Lynnwood that provides primary care services for low-income communities.
"As children of immigrants, we understand the stigma and how they're afraid to talk about mental health and neuroscience. When in reality, it starts now in the community. Students can do a project and see if it's for you. Neuroscience is such an undiscovered field. As a freshman, I didn't know much about it and thought it was super complicated, when in reality, it doesn't have to be that way, breaking it down and giving students a chance to try it out, and can open doors to continue to diversify this field," Enriquez shared about the program.
NeuroYouth provides a summer program from June to September, where students ages 14 to 18 can work with mentors and conduct research related to mental health or brain science.
Kwon and Enriquez wanted the application process to be straightforward to determine if students would be a good fit relative to their interests in mental health research.
This year, they received 15 applications and the inaugural class welcomed seven scholars.
One of this year's scholars, Rohan Badgandi is a recent immigrant from Pune, India. He and his family moved to the greater Seattle area last year for better education opportunities. He's currently a senior at Interlake High School.
"I thought this program was a gift from the heavens. I was looking for something like this, but university research programs tend to be expensive and I wanted an opportunity to do research on my own. It's amazing and I hope it's a first step towards a lifetime of research," Badgandi shared.
Baghandi conducted a literature review on strategies to mitigate acculturative stress -- the stress experienced by an immigrant when they immigrate to a new environment, and the stress of adapting -- reconciling old culture with new culture.
"The reason I picked this is because I moved to the United States last year and I experienced this first hand. I was like, this isn't great and it would've been helpful if I had resources and advice on managing that, that's why I did what I did," he added.
He created and coordinated translations of posters that helped recent immigrants learn strategies to mitigate stress. The posters were translated into eight different languages and posted up in places in the greater Seattle area where the immigrant communities were.
Another scholar, Liba Mutjabi, launched a food drive for Sophia Way, a homeless shelter for women in Bellevue. Mutjabi worked with a mentor to conduct research on food insecurity and mental health in marginalized communities.
In addition, Sofia Raistakka interned at the University of Washington's Dr. Moreno Lab and studied the relationship between hummingbird heart health and brain function. Hummingbirds' hearts and brains are interconnected and her research looked at physiological processes that allow hummingbirds to have high energy levels.
"When students have the resources and can be paired with mentors, that's when real impact unfolds. The program empowers youth to be changemakers in their community," Kwon said.
Kwon also shared that the hope is that in the future, the program can be expanded to the rest of Washington state, as well as the United States.
Despite the program being mostly in-person, they did have one virtual participant this year. Kwon also hopes to create a virtual program that can be tailored to the local regions so that more people can be included.
What is important to note is that NeuroYouth is completely youth-led.
"We recognize that teenagers like us are rarely given the opportunities to do something like this. From start to end, including writing grants, everything was youth-led and that's amazing," she added.
"Being youth-led and being supported by like-minded youth is the heart of this program, specifically getting to connect BIPOC youth to allow them to do research. This is why we're here, we want to continue to break down barriers for students like us. This is what pushes us forward," Enriquez shared.
NeuroYouth received a total of $15,000, including $10,000 from Snohomish Community foundations and the rest from local community organizations.
Enriquez shared that last year, they thought they were delusional for doing something like this, but nevertheless, they made it happen.