Congratulations to Dr. Heidi Gold-Dworkin for receiving the Million Women Mentors STEM Trailblazer Award. Recipients of this national award have made notable contributions to their respective peers and community and demonstrated excellence in the field of mentoring and STEM.

Dr. Gold-Dworkin is the founder of Little Scientists, an international leader in early childhood, elementary and middle school hands-on science education. What most people might not know is that the program had piloted at the JCC of Greater New Haven when it first started and has been a success there ever since. “I would do one a month and it would take me a month to design the class,” she said in an interview with Sandra Diamond Fox for The Hour. “The following year, I offered the program as a weekly enrichment class and people were coming from different parts of the state to take this class.”

Dr. Gold-Dworkin, who had taught college-level science classes at Yale, found a special challenge in building a program for toddlers and young children. The idea first came to her when her daughter Aviva, a toddler at the time, asked her curious questions about the world she was discovering. Motivated by the desire to help children explore the natural phenomena around them, she started Little Scientists; the rest is history.

She lives in Milford with her husband, Jay. They have three children, Aviva, Olivia and Robert. All five family members are valued supporters of the Jewish Federation and Israel.