I am dedicated to scientific communication and outreach, particularly in making research accessible to all people, regardless of their education or background. In addition to being an enthusiastic lecturer and mentor, I encourage and participate in engagement with the non-scientific community wherever possible. I have given guest talks to numerous non-specialist groups (e.g., Color Vision Research Society of Canada, Ontario Art Institute). I developed and ran a speaker's series at the University of Toronto aimed at engaging non-academics with scientific research and fostering public speaking capacity in graduate students. And in April of 2017 I organized, chaired and contributed to an Up Goer Five Challenge at a scientific conference in New Orleans, LA - the challenge is to explain your research using the top 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language. Please click here to see what it's like to describe some of my current work in Madagascar without jargon (!) and try the challenge yourself by clicking on the online text editor here!