Neuroscience Outreach: MiNDs

MiNDS Graduate Student Leadership: (top left) Denise Croote, Joseph Simon, Brittany Hemmer, Michael Fernando, Kelsey Lucerne (bottom right).

Mentoring in Neuroscience Discovery at Sinai (MiNDS) is a graduate student-run outreach organization out of the Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai. We are determined to make neuroscience education fun and accessible to the East Harlem community. Every year, we organize a series of public lectures, sheep brain dissections, laboratory tours, brain fairs, and classroom courses with the mission of reducing the barrier of entry into STEM fields.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we sought to help teachers, parents, and caretakers transition to online learning by providing our community with engaging lessons. Our lessons take about 20 minutes to complete and are geared towards Kindergarten through 3rd grade learners.

Lesson #1 starts off with an introduction to the nervous system and Lesson #2 goes over the cells that make up our brains (neurons). These lessons can be downloaded from our website and are equipped with fun hands-on activities that can be done at home. We will be uploading more every week, so continually check out our site to see what’s next!

We hope that these lessons foster a new conversation in households across the city and excite the next generation of neuroscientists. Check us out at https://webcommons.mssm.edu/minds/ and follow us on Twitter @SinaiNeuro! Feel free to reach out to us with any questions at mindatsinai@gmail.com

MiNDS – Building community through mentorship