Teaching neuroethics at MIT’s MOSTEC

Every year, MIT’s Office of Engineering Outreach Programs runs a six-month online course for rising high school seniors from underrepresented backgrounds: the MIT Online Science, Technology, and Engineering Community (or MOSTEC) program. To culminate the course, the students meet up at MIT for an intense week of face-to-face courses. This year, I had the privilege of teaching an neuroethics for MOSTEC. This is the first time they’ve brought in someone to teach neuroethics, and so it was a (successful) experiment for both of us. The students were excited to learn what neurotechnologies exist, talk through difficult medical ethics cases, and apply what they learned to their own capstone projects.