With a Ph.D. in biology and 10 years experience as a researcher and educator, I am a skilled behavioral ecologist, with extensive lab🔬and field 🏞 experience focusing on fish behaviour 🐠 and brain 🧠 morphologyI grew up on a small farm in eastern Ontario and spent my time exploring the fields, bogs, and woodlands around my home 🦌🌳. Farm life instilled in me a lasting curiosity about the natural world 🍄 and taught me valuable skills for succeeding at field work 🛠. As a graduate student, I have led and supervised numerous undergraduate research projects - guiding students in labs and the field. Additionally, I served as Concordia's aquatic animal care technician 💦, and was a team member on several trips to remote field sites 🗺.During my Ph.D. I've published eight papers and my research has produced novel contributions to our understanding of phenotypic plasticity in teleost brain morphology 🧠 and behaviour 🐟, induced by environmental factors like predation 🦈 and captivity 🧱. Put simply - frightened fish grow differently shaped brains, and it can happen rapidly ⚡️. My paper was the first to report on this rapid change ⏱, and was named Editor's Choice when published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. I also described and validated a generalized methodology for estimating the volume of biological structures from a 2D image 📸, later published in the journal Evolutionary Ecology.My expertise in biology 🐸, and my transdisciplinary approach to problem-solving 🧩, were tapped to collect and generate pedagogical content for SALTISE. Later, those same skills led to my involvement in developing and co-teaching a novel interdisciplinary seminar 🌱⚗️🧲.I am eager to contribute my research, interpersonal, and science communication skills to help your organization's projects succeed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Maybe a good start is to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything, as long as it's explained clearly enough. And then go and ask for explanations. And if you're thinking 'Well what do I ask for?' ask yourself if there's anything in your life you want changed. That's where to start.James Burke