For five days in mid-July 2023, high school students from around the world participated in the Center for Neurotechnology (CNT) Young Scholars Program-REACH (YSP-REACH). YSP-REACH was created to promote interest and increase knowledge about neuroscience and neural engineering in high school students.

This year 19 students attended the program in-person at the CNT on the University of Washington Seattle campus and 90 students attended morning sessions of the program online via Zoom. Although most students in YSP-REACH were from schools in the Puget Sound area, some students traveled to the UW campus from Canada, Oregon, Florida and North Carolina and others connected to the program online from Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Utah, New York, Virginia, California, Idaho, Texas, Turkey, Korea, China, and Brazil.

Mental health could be considered a new frontier, one where the undiscovered landscape exists mostly in the brain. In this space, there are vast numbers of people impacted by mental illness, and there is a profound opportunity for science and technology to play an important role in bettering the human condition. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mental health disorders are among the most common health conditions in the United States. And more than half of us will be diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in our lives. Although great strides have been made in recent years in the development of potent drugs that treat symptoms of many types of mental illnesses, the underlying mechanisms of most of these diseases are still not well understood.