Teaching
Teaching is very important to me because I see education as a cornerstone of civilizations. Being a careful and passionate teacher is essential to train the next generation of scientists. As a researcher, I feel it’s one of the powerful ways to influence the world around us. I have been involved in teaching assistantships and as a mentor since the start of my PhD program, with efficient knowledge transmission as an objective. I was a demonstrator for the wet lab course BIO 3102 where students characterized a gene, from DNA extraction to expression analysis. I was also a demonstrator for the Biostatistics 1 and 2 courses (BIO 2041 and 2042), helping students to build a knowledge of the principles of statistics applied to biological data and teaching them to code with R. Finally, I was also a demonstrator for a genetic class BIO 1204. In general, teaching pushed me to master concepts and methods and helped me adapt my talk for different audiences. Apart from TA, I also mentor undergraduate and graduate students along my journey at the PhD level to give back to other students the knowledge I learned. This experience gave me precious knowledge on how to manage students from different levels and adapt the objectives, explanations, and liberty I gave them depending on the support they needed. The plurality of people I worked with allowed me to understand that different people have different needs in terms of supervision, and it’s crucial a supervisor can adapt to best support students.
Outreach
Outreach is very important to me. I like to meet with the public and share my results or science facts in an informal way. I have always loved to understand things and be able to explain them in an accessible way. Since the beginning of my graduate studies, I have participated in the researcher night three times, in 2021, 2022, and 2024. I’ve presented three different things at these meeting, starting with explaining my research on flower evolution, then meeting on face to face with the public to talk about graduate studies, research in general and academia and finally leveraging my formation in phytochemistry to talk about hot pepper and capsaicin, the main molecule involved in the burning sensation. I gained a lot of experience during these meetings and really liked to participate. In 2024, I also participated in an event organized by the Botanical Garden of Montreal about urban agriculture, where I presented my research to the public and used my pollinator specimens to start chatting. In 2024, I also redacted my first vulgarization paper in the magazine “Quatre Temps” where I popularized two recent research articles about the concerns emitted by scientists about the pollination by domestic bees instead of other bees. I liked these experiences, and they helped me a lot to communicate with the public and my family. Outreach is important for society and for researchers to adapt their messages and transmit information, fighting fake news.