Suzanne Simard

Simard discussed her work and her book Finding the Mother Tree on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour in March 2022.

In 2022 Simard appeared as a panelist in Canada Reads, advocating for Clayton Thomas-Müller's book Life in the City of Dirty Water.

Simard's life and work served as the primary inspiration for Patricia Westerford, a central character in Richard Powers' 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Overstory, in which Westerford pioneers the controversial idea that trees can communicate with each other, and is ridiculed by fellow scientists before eventually being vindicated.

Suzanne Simard is an advocate of science communication. At the University of British Columbia she initiated with colleagues Dr. Julia Dordel and Dr. Maja Krzic the Communication of Science Program TerreWEB, which has been training graduate students to become better communicators of their research since 2011. Simard has appeared in videos intended for general audiences, including three TED talks, the short documentary Do trees communicate?, and the longer documentary films Intelligent Trees (where she appears alongside forester and author Peter Wohlleben) and Fantastic Fungi. New Scientist magazine interviewed Simard in 2021. Suzanne Simard has published a book where she reviews her discoveries about the life of trees and forests along with autobiographical notes.

Suzanne Simard (born 1960) is a Canadian scientist who is a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. After growing up in the Monashee Mountains, British Columbia, she received her PhD in Forest Sciences at Oregon State University. Prior to teaching at the University of British Columbia, Simard worked as a research scientist at the British Columbia Ministry of Forests.