Journalism, Communication, and New Media Faculty

As a faculty member, I have continued to work as a freelance journalist for more than 20 years, publishing a book called Letters From Prison about the experiences of federal prisoners across Canada and the United States, and a book about orangutans called The Intimate Ape: Orangutans and The Secret Life of a Vanishing Species. The orangutan book was written over ten years of travel to Borneo, Sumatra and other parts of the world. I wrote an online column for Psychology Today magazine about people and apes, was an expert witness for a court case in Argentina about an orangutan named Sandra, testifying and writing four reports for the court, and published an article on how to design science experiments with great apes in order to support the court action of the Nonhuman Rights Project seeking to win personhood rights for intelligent species in U.S. court.

I am the former chair of the Thompson Rivers University arts faculty Academic Standards Committee; former chair of the university Harassment and Discrimination Prevention Committee; former chair of the Community Advisory Board for the local maximum-security provincial prison in Kamloops.