Since Fall 2022, I have been the TSI Outreach coordinator. The TSI has a long history of science outreach in Montreal and aims to increase public awareness and interest in astronomy, reach non-traditional audiences, improve primary and secondary school science education, and give graduate students, postdocs and faculty opportunities to develop communication skills to interact with the public. 

As outreach coordinator, I work to achieve these goals through various programming. I organized our monthly public talk series called AstroNight which brings cutting edge topics in science to the wider community. Below you can find a recording of a recent public talk I gave at AstroNight! I also co-host school groups at McGill for a day of hands-on activities. 

This year, I have also been working on growing our online community by producing instagram reels: short, 1-3 minute videos on various topics in space science. Our initial goal was to make sure that people learned something new whenever they scrolled past our posts. Since starting this initiative, we have welcomed over 14,000 new followers to our online community, and our videos have amassed over 1 million views. This new form of outreach has allowed us to engage with science enthusiasts around the world, and has helped us reach a younger audience; a demographic whose engagement was dwindling since the start of the pandemic.  

In Fall 2022, we at the TSI have partnered with Branches and the Office of Indigenous Initiatives at McGill in order to better serve indigenous students and communities here in Quebec. Our involvement is two-pronged: we work to provide programming for indigenous CEGEP (pre-university) and university students here in the Montreal area, and we also work with communities up north. 

In January 2023, I  co-hosted students and mentors from the Branches: Pick Your Path program at TSI. We provided an action-packed afternoon of lab visits, chats with researchers, short presentations about cutting edge science, and observing at the Anna McPherson Observatory. 

In addition, I had the opportunity and the privilege of travelling to the Cree Nation of Chisasibi located 1500 km north of Montreal. While there, I co-led  an astronomy workshop at the first annual Conference of Workshops: Prep for Success, an event which aims to prepare high school students for post-secondary life. Our workshop exposed students to current research fields in space science and also to what a career in academia can look like.  

In additions to physics, I also have a background in philosophy and I remain involved with philosophical thought through the Ideas in Practice initiative. 

Philosophy is meant to provide the tools for conceptual analysis which help us better understand the world around us. Yet academic philosophy, for many, has become an obscure intellectual ivory tower which is completely inaccessible. My co-director and I aim to bridge this gap by bringing philosophers and non-philosopher practitioners from a variety of disciplines together in one place and create a platform for the cross-pollination of ideas.

So far we have had 5 panels on topics ranging from How Computers Generate Knowledge to Creativity in Math and Music. You can find out more here!