When Mónica López-Hidalgo asked me to grab lunch during a campus visit at the University of California, San Diego back in April, I had no idea she would bring me to the verge of tears as she told me about her work. López-Hidalgo, associate professor at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), is an accomplished astrocyte researcher in her own right, but it was the work she does through her outreach program, Neurociencias Para Todos, that inspired me to record and share this follow-up conversation.
Neurociencias Para Todos (Neuroscience for Everyone) focuses on fostering neuroscience education in some of Mexico’s most remote communities, such as the mountain towns of Itxtepec and Laguna de Guadalupe. Some of the communities they reach don’t have electricity or running water, and students across different grade levels sometimes learn in one room all together. Maybe a few of their graduates will attend the state university.
The program began in 2019, when López-Hidalgo was in her second year as faculty at UNAM. Two students, Laura del Pilar-Martínez and Jonathan Gutiérrez, approached López-Hidalgo with an idea: They wanted to bring what they were learning in the classroom to their surrounding communities. At the same time, López-Hidalgo started realizing that some of the work she was doing in her lab—even just looking at tissues of the nervous system—was something most students would never be able to do in rural communities. Early during the planning stages, López-Hidalgo looped in another UNAM professor, Ericka de los Ríos-Arellano, and the four of them launched Neurociencias Para Todos with the goal of quite literally making the nervous system more visible to rural communities in Mexico.
Every other year, Neurociencias Para Todos brings about 20 teachers from these remote regions to the UNAM campus in the Mexican state of Querétaro, where they spend three days learning about the brain and how to teach their students about it. The program also organizes neuroscience fairs in rural communities, where students and teachers alike can come to peer through a microscope for the first time.
The focus on training teachers rather than students is intentional. López-Hidalgo’s father was a teacher, and he instilled in her a strong belief in the power of education and the importance of training teachers—as a mathematician, he taught others how to teach math.
Teachers in rural Mexico often have limited resources and are tasked with teaching multiple classes in various subjects, from math to biology. Neurociencias Para Todos’ first challenge is to bring these teachers up to speed on neuroscience, first by empowering them to see the cellular world inside of onions, insects and brain tissue. “We try to amaze them so they can feel all of the energy to go back to amaze the kids,” López-Hidalgo says.
In addition to sharing knowledge, Neurociencias Para Todos provides teachers with a backpack that includes an entire portable laboratory that they can bring back to their communities. A large portion of their hands-on workshop focuses on how to use the equipment and run lesson plans with their students. The portable laboratory includes low-cost, durable microscopes built by the Neurociencias Para Todos team, which are adapted from the “RoachScope” kits from Backyard Brains.
The team has encountered some surprising challenges along the way. Several of the communities Neurociencias Para Todos serves don’t only speak Spanish—they also speak Indigenous languages such as Maya or Hñähñu. To address this, López-Hidalgo is collaborating with language researchers at UNAM to translate their lesson plans into Indigenous languages, which often means creating new words for terms such as microscope, brain and hippocampus. López-Hidalgo says she feels it is important for the students to engage with science in their native language: “To make this [science education] accessible for all, we need to go to them. We don’t need to teach them English to come to us.”
