Jennifer Taylor-O'Connor

Jen Taylor-O'Connor is an attorney, animal cognition researcher, and educator internationally recognized for her groundbreaking work in interspecies communication with parrots. She is the co-founder of Parrot Kindergarten, an educational platform that helps caregivers teach their birds to communicate through augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools. Jen is best known for training her parrot, Ellie, to use a tablet-based speech board with over 300 selections, a journey that has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, Forbes, and in a feature documentary exploring animal sentience and interspecies communication. Her research has been presented at major scientific conferences, including ACM CHI, and she collaborates with institutions such as MIT, Northeastern, and the University of Miami. Jen is passionate about bridging the worlds of science, technology, and animal caregiving to reimagine what is possible in interspecies connection.