Aria Rani
SindledeckER

Aria Rani Sindledecker is a Sophomore at Mountain View High School. She is an advocate and activist for mental health. 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 the President of the Neuroscience Club at her school, and is an MVHS Ambassador.

 

Rani is a Student Research Assistant for UC Riverside to work on a confidential social services project for youth mental health. This summer, 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. She is also a Youth Consultant 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 Coalition for Youth and the California Children’s Trust. 

 

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 three award-winning short films that spotlight issues surrounding mental health: 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; 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 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.