Aria Rani
SindledeckER

Aria Rani Sindledecker, 16, is a Junior at Mountain View High School. She is an advocate and activist for mental health. She is the Mental Health Committee Lead and an Executive Board Member of the Ambassadors, a 60-student organization at her school that focuses on promoting community on campus. She is the Student Founder of her school's Peer Counselors program. She is the President of her high school club chapter of Bring Change to Mind and a member of the BC2M Teen Advisory Board. She is also a member of her district's Superintendent's Advisory Board. 

 

Rani is a Student Research Assistant for UC Riverside's Department of Psychiatry for Dr. Lisa Fortuna and Dr. Michelle Porche to work on a confidential social services project for youth mental health. During the summer of 2023, she started working with Dr. Belinda Wang of the UC San Francisco Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences as an intern using R for data analysis in ASD in the Matthew State Lab. And in the summer of 2024 she continued to work in the Matthew State Lab (and joining the Helen Willsey Lab) on a neuroscience research project involving cell culture, antibody staining, transfections, microscopy and more. She is also a Youth Strategy Advisor for the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing, developing an adolescent mental health curriculum, and a youth consultant for the Children's Partnership’s $10 million peer-to-peer rollout. She is on the Youth Advisory Board of the California Children’s Trust. She is also on the Youth Advisory Committee of the California Partners Project, co-founded by First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

 

Rani is a prolific public speaker. She was invited to speak at the opening of UCSF's Pritzker Psychiatry building, the Krause Center of Innovation, on a panel for UCSF and the Commonwealth Club, at the California Council of Community Behavioral Health Agencies, at Bring Change to Mind’s Scientific Advisory Council’s introduction to a dialogue series centered around Stigma, Personhood, Context and Culture: Humanization and Inclusion for All, at Good for Media’s Designing Social Media for Youth Mental Health and more. 

 

Rani is also a documentarian, having created four award-winning short films that spotlight issues surrounding mental health: Mentally Educated, which underscores the importance of implementing mental health education for all 8th graders across the nation, and won second place out of 3000 high school entries for the StudentCam competition; The Peer-to-Peer Movement: Students Saving Lives, which emphasizes the need for more peer-to-peer solutions in schools to aid the current and overburdened mental health resources, and won second place out of 3000 high school entries for the StudentCam competition; Stigma-Free Nation: Pathway to Parity, which highlights mental health stigma among youth and the need for parity between physical and mental health services, and won first place out of 2000 middle school entries for the StudentCam competition; and Power to Save a Life, which focuses on the social media crisis and the need for more digital citizenship in schools at an early age and won honorable mention for the C-SPAN StudentCam competition. To spread her passion for filmmaking, Rani teaches middle school students how to advocate through the medium and helps them submit to various contests.