At Connected Minds, community engagement isn’t an add-on to research, it’s part of how we understand impact. If our work is meant to shape healthier, more just futures, then it needs to be visible, accessible, and meaningful beyond academic walls, especially to young people who are often left out of conversations about research, technology, and innovation.
This belief guided a recent collaboration with the Go Green Youth Centre (GGYC), a community-based organization that supports children and youth in Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park through sport, education, and leadership development. Through its Leaders in Training program, GGYC creates spaces where young people build confidence, connection, and a sense of possibility. Welcoming these students into the research spaces of Connected Minds allowed those values to connect with the interdisciplinary work happening across the program and at York University more broadly.
The visit was rooted in the simple but powerful idea of showing youth what research looks like in practice, who it involves, and how it connects to real lives and real communities.
The day began with an engaging session led by Professor Alison Harvey, who introduced students to research on video games and digital literacy. Through discussion and a lively Kahoot game, students explored common stereotypes about gaming and learned how researchers examine the benefits and risks of digital play in today’s connected world. Many were surprised to discover that video games can be studied as cultural, social, and communicative tools, and even more excited to learn that programs like Connected Minds support this kind of work. For students who already game regularly, seeing their everyday experiences reflected through an academic lens opened new ways of thinking about how hobbies and research intersect.
From there, Marriah Alcantara led a discussion on the ethics of using machine learning to decode animal communication. Students were invited to consider animal translation projects, which aim to use AI to interpret animal signals, and to grapple with the potential benefits and harms of such technologies. The session pushed students to think beyond human-centered technology and consider how interdisciplinary research, drawing from philosophy, ethics, and computer science, can shape more responsible relationships between humans and other species.
The group then visited Professor Robert Allison’s Virtual Reality and Perception Lab in the Lassonde School of Engineering. Students experienced firsthand how virtual reality and perception research brings engineering and psychology together. By wearing VR headsets and engaging with immersive simulations, they learned how depth perception, vision, and sensory cues interact to shape our experience of virtual and augmented environments. Seeing how subtle changes in visual information can affect perception made abstract concepts tangible and highlighted how interdisciplinary approaches drive innovation in emerging technologies.
In Professor George Mochizuki’s Disorders of Neurologic Motor Control (DyNaMiC/Balance) Lab, students took part in balance activities and movement exercises designed to demonstrate how neurologic injury can affect mobility and coordination. Using examples from neuroimaging and neurophysiological research, the lab showcased how scientists study balance and movement both in clinical settings and in the community. For many students, this helped illustrate how research can translate directly into improved practices and outcomes for people living with neurological conditions.
The afternoon continued in Professor Ozzy Mermut’s MiBAR Lab, where students were introduced to the field of biophotonics and the role light plays in medical research. Hearing directly from graduate trainees, students learned how radiation techniques are used in cancer research and how biophotonics connects to fields ranging from medicine and chemistry to agriculture and beyond. The session emphasized that the skills developed through scientific research can open doors to a wide range of careers, often in ways students may not have previously imagined.
The day concluded with an exciting visit to Professor Laurence Harris’s lab in the Faculty of Health, where students explored how our senses work together to shape perception. Through hands-on demonstrations involving motion, balance, and visual orientation, including experiences with tumbling stations and the Edgeless Graphics Geometry (EGG) system, students saw how perception is far more complex than the idea of “five senses.” Experiencing these research tools in action brought abstract concepts to life, including how humans perceive the world both on Earth and in space.
The visit with GGYC reinforced why partnerships like this matter. When research meets community, both are changed. For Connected Minds, it was a meaningful reminder that our impact grows strongest when we open our doors, listen closely, and build relationships that extend beyond the lab and into the lives of the people our work is meant to support.