Making Neuroscience Accessible

It started with a DNA model in eighth grade. I was building it to explain CIPA, congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, a rare condition where a single gene mutation leaves people unable to feel pain or sweat. I was captivated by how a condition that seems so desirable actually makes an individual's life so perilous. That contradiction is what planted a question I haven't been able to shake since: how can one tiny change in our genetic code rewrite the entire experience of being human?

That question is what pulled me toward the brain. Over the next few years, I went from reading about neurons to actually sitting with the science up close, shadowing family medicine and pediatrics physicians to see how neurological symptoms show up in real patients, then working through primary literature on neurogenesis and neurodegenerative disease, which eventually became my first published review in Curieux Academic Journal. Every step taught me some version of the same lesson: neuroscience isn't just diagrams of synapses in a textbook. It's the actual machinery behind how we think, remember, feel, and sometimes lose pieces of ourselves to disease.

“Most students don't encounter real neuroscience until college, if ever—and by then, plenty of curious kids have already quietly decided ‘that's not for me.’”

I started YoungAxons to close that gap earlier. Through presentations, games, blog posts, and outreach, it breaks down brain science for students who are exactly where I was a few years ago: curious, a little intimidated, and just looking for someone to make it click. I started The Early Perspective Podcast for the same reason, just in a more personal, conversation-driven format.

My long-term aim is to become a physician-scientist, someone who treats patients and pushes the research forward at the same time, so the distance between a discovery in the lab and a change at someone's bedside gets a little shorter. YoungAxons is where that goal starts, years before any of that—not in a hospital or a lab yet, but in classrooms and comment sections, one curious kid at a time.