The League of Remarkable Women in Science

"We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves"

[remarkablewomeninscience]

“There is more than one way to lead effectively, to manage effectively or to get the job done”

Dr Lynne McIntyre works at CSIRO Brisbane, where she is a research director for the Agriculture Flagship.

Can you tell me a little about you? For example, how did you become interested in science? I was brought up to believe that it was important that women could be financially independent. I am a product of the seventies with this “Girls can do anything” attitude. I am the eldest of three girls, my parents were very keen that their daughters could achieve their potential, that we used the talents we had been given. That was always in the back of our mind, it wasn’t really conscious, it wasn’t really stated but when I look back, it was obviously a strong influence for my sisters and I. When I was at high school, I was reasonably academic, I liked humanities subjects but couldn’t think of a career in this area. I also really liked sciences and could think of jobs that I would enjoy doing. The more I was into sciences, the more I was interested in genetics and molecular genetics, which was only just starting. I decided that was what I was going to pursue. It then became a question of what kind of genetics: medicine or something else? I decided I wanted to do agriculture and plant genetics. As a teenager I went through a phase when I thought that it was better to feed the world than to save it, I thought that you needed to provide food before providing medicine. That made sense when I was sixteen! I contemplated doing medicine but the more I thought about genetics, the more I changed my mind. In year 11 or year 12 at high school, I decided that I wasn’t going to be a doctor but I would do agriculture and I was going to focus on genetics and make more food.

How does it feel to do exactly what you thought you would be doing when you were sixteen or seventeen? It feels good! I actually thought I would do a PhD when I was still at high school. I kind of had everything sorted out! I had a doctor for an uncle and my grandfather was in academia, at the University of Sydney. I asked them a few questions, I don’t remember the conversations but I know we talked about these things. I knew that you had to have a PhD to be in charge. I was very introverted and very quiet but I always thought “Let’s do a PhD now”: I wasn’t sure I would want to be in charge but at least, having a PhD, I would have the choice!

What has been your career path? What drives you and makes you enjoy your current work position? What keeps you motivated when everything seems to fall apart? It’s been good. I had a lecturer at the University of Sydney who knew some people at CSIRO Plant Industry and at the Australian National University. He took his fourth year students on a road trip to Canberra to meet with these people. That really opened my eyes: it was a phenomenal place to study. My lecturer helped me line up an Honours project with CSIRO and through that a PhD jointly with ANU and CSIRO. I then moved to the University of Missouri. I had a tenure track position there, a really good position but there weren’t that many opportunities for my fiancé. So we decided to come back to Australia. I thought I was a reasonable candidate, that I could come back. I felt I was in a reasonable place to create new opportunities for myself, it was early enough in my career for me to do that. Making the decision to come back was though in one sense but easy in another because I wanted to get married and I am still married to that man! We have had two children together. Because I made a big decision based on personal reasons (we wanted to get married and have children), I was prepared to be flexible. Life is about compromises. I was hoping it would work out, there was a good possibility that things could work out but I was also prepared to be flexible and to have different career paths if that was what I needed to do. I came back to a contract position in CSIRO. The job worked out well and I was advised within a couple of years that they were likely to make me indefinite. We came back in the early nineties, and Brisbane was really expanding, things were really happening after Expo 88. That was one of the reasons why we came to Brisbane, we thought it would be a good place to come back to. From a plant and agricultural science perspective, Canberra and Adelaide were the very large centres, with a little bit happening in Sydney. It was really starting to take off in Brisbane. CSIRO has a hierarchy and as you move up in this structure, you are going from managing yourself or a small team to managing a larger project, to being a team or a group leader. I have gone gradually from small to larger teams. I have been a group leader, managing about thirty people. I then became a program leader within Plant Industry and had sixty or eighty people in my group. I am now a research director for the Agriculture Flagship. I have about a hundred CSIRO officers in my program but probably a hundred and fifty if you include affiliated students. So it’s a large program, on three main sites: Adelaide, Canberra and Brisbane. I enjoy facilitating science. I enjoy looking for opportunities, synergies, I enjoy helping people realize their potential, their science dreams. I enjoy helping science happen hopefully a little bit better, a little bit more efficiently. Having people pointing out that positions were coming up and telling me that I should think about them, coupled with my parents telling me to always do my very best gave me the confidence to be prepared, to try things. So, if doors opened, I could walk through them, and I could take myself out of my comfort zone. I think it’s a combination of support and encouragement: people wouldn’t be suggesting it unless they thought you could do it.

When did you realize for the first time that there was a gender imbalance in science? I think I wasn’t really conscious of the fact that there were so few female scientists. It’s only when you look back sometimes that you realize this. You don’t know what you are missing sometimes. It was what it was and you just made the most of it. There weren’t many female scientists in Canberra when I was doing my PhD, there weren’t many female scientists when I was in the US, and there weren’t that many female scientists when I came back to Queensland. It wasn’t something unusual, it was quite “normal”. So I don’t think I was conscious of missing anything. Most of the people who helped me were men. One of the things I appreciated the most with them is that I never felt that gender was an issue; they were always dealing with me as a scientist, looking at my abilities as a scientist. Probably because of the way my parents brought us up, I also never thought of gender as an issue. It always has been a surprise when it turned out to be an issue. I think I started being really aware of this when I was pregnant. You could see there was an attitude of reduced expectations, some people were fairly sure you weren’t going to come back. That was the first time I really noticed a difference. If there were more women around, more women having children, that attitude wouldn’t have been so prevalent. But it didn’t really affect me, though.

What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues? There are different levels of struggles for me. For my science career, the biggest challenge has been this idea of being prepared to walk through doors, when you are shy and self-doubting (which I know is very common), being prepared to take opportunities when they arrive. But as a scientist, work-life balance is a constant struggle. You can do it all but you cannot have everything. You have to prioritize and work out what’s most important, what you have to do, what you can do without in the work-life balance. And then, more generically, the lack of funding, declining funding in research and development, in agriculture in particular for me, is quite concerning regarding career paths for younger scientists. The lack of funding in longer term R&D is also a concern for me. What we deliver is based on a pipeline from blue sky research to applied research. It worries me that we are increasingly short-termed in our outlook. It’s a struggle for me, it’s a struggle for my group and I think for research organisations in general.

What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of? At a personal level, I am happily married, I have a lovely family, I have two happy and healthy boys who are about to start their own adult lives. I think it’s a great achievement to be able to do that while being a successful scientist. I am proud of where I am, I am a research director in one of Australia’s most important research organisations, in the largest flagship in CSIRO. I am proud of where CSIRO got to and I like to think I have had a role in that as well.

Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor? My parents were very encouraging of their daughters and wanting us to be the best that we could be, to be able to earn our own income. That was probably my first level of support. My uncle and grand-father, both being scientists, were kind of key jigsaw pieces but that was just one or two conversations, they helped me make my decision whereas my parents were always there for my sisters and I while we were trying to figure out what we would do, what we could do. Do you do science because boys do science, girls don’t, all that kind of things. They were very good at that. On one hand, I like to be who I am, and by almost ignoring gender, I try to encourage people to focus on your science, your research, show them that everything else is second. This is one of my approaches. But on the other hand, I have been reminded on many occasions that people do see me as a role model for women in science. I have never thought of myself as being successful but to other people, I seem to be successful. I am now a research director, I am married, and I have children. My husband was a very successful lecturer. There is both an active and passive aspects at being a role model and you need both. I do try to make myself available when people want to talk about how I found what works for me, I share advice and things that people need to consider.

What has been the most important advice you were ever given? Girls can do anything. Initially, that was probably the biggest driver I had. Growing up in the seventies and doing sciences, thinking that I would do it because I loved it even if “girls weren’t good at it”, being told to pursue your dreams was really powerful.

What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists? I would say: be flexible! Take opportunities as they arise. When people draw your attention to areas that are related and that you are quite interested in them but you are not sure that you can do it, then it’s when you really have to make it. When you think it’s interesting but you are not sure that you can do it, that’s when you should do it!

Self-confidence is not always easy to build. How have you dealt with confidence issues? Do you have tips/tricks that helped you with establishing yourself as a leader in your field? I have grown into the different positions I have had. It’s almost a negative reinforcement: if somebody has appointed me into a certain role, then they must believe that I am good… I guess I have seen enough of it to have enough confidence, to know that I can have these roles: I have done it in the past. For this particular position I am now in, I have gone to somebody that I trusted, asking them “Am I crazy even considering to apply for this job?”. They gave me very good feedback, and told me that I would be a serious contender for this kind of position. That gave me some confidence. CSIRO is pretty good at providing leadership training, in fact even insisting on some levels of leadership training. Certainly the most senior leadership training I have done I found extremely useful. It was quite surprising to realize how many senior scientists have these common fears related to self-confidence. It was also interesting to realise that, when I told people that I am actually quite shy, they looked at me strangely, thinking that I was joking… I must be covering fairly well! You build confidence with time. It’s an issue every time you step up in another role because you are not sure that you can do this. But you wouldn’t have been appointed if people didn’t think you could do it. And then you look back to the old roles you have had and you can see that you have done quite a good job, even though you had exactly the same concerns then. Training helps, some of the training around self-awareness also helps. Having managers or peers with whom you have a strong relationship, where you can have honest conversations, is also extremely useful.

Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you? Choosing a good partner is important! My husband is a wonderful person, very egalitarian in his approach. I have risen to more senior level than him and he has always been very supportive, very proud of what I have done. That’s one thing. Secondly, he has regarded our family as a shared responsibility, it’s something he has always wanted to actively participate in. Although some activities may not have been equally shared (because it tended to fall along our interests), it has always been a shared responsibility. From the time we had a nanny and we would organise who would go to work first and come home early, who would go to work late and come home late, to juggling school commitments, holiday commitments, we have always done it as a team. That has been extremely important. I have been very fortunate that the teams with whom I have worked have been also quite supportive of work-life balance. That’s been extremely useful. I have worked in an environment where work-life balance has been taken very seriously. I think it’s important to be realistic. If you do have a family and want to spend time with your family, then you have to realize that your outputs, no matter how efficiently you work, are likely to be fewer than somebody who works a sixty hour week. Some people want to do this and they are entitled to. They are likely to be promoted before you because their output will be greater. You have to be realistic about these things. There are consequences to your decisions, there are benefits and there are downsides. You have to be prepared for that. You have to constantly reassess. There are times where you have to give more emphasis to one part or the other. You have to meet your expectations in terms of work productivity, that’s a given. But there are times where you have to go with the flow, there might be times where I would love to spend to week-end finalizing an exciting paper but my sons, my husband, my parents or my friends need me. Sometimes you just need to go to the gym or play netball or something. You need to have this balance, you need to be realistic and you need to constantly self-assess and readjust. It’s easy to work just a bit too late so your personal time or something you do for you personally is what gives. Timetabling can be an effective way to reduce the risk of having this happening. I am not brilliant at self-discipline when it comes to not checking my emails, for example. My husband and I try to travel every year now that our sons are in their twenties. I will still take my iPhone and I will check my emails every day. I will try to respond only if it’s extremely urgent. I have someone standing in for me, someone who will deal with things but I find it very difficult not to check every couple of days, to know what is going on. I think I am reasonably good at not getting involved, I trust the person I have delegated to to deal with it. I try to tell myself that one of the reasons why I like to stay in touch is because it makes it easier to catch up when you do get back. I try to set things up so I have delegates, partly because that’s an opportunity for people to see what it’s like to be at this level. Part of being a leader is training your replacement. I am aware some people find that hard and there probably have been times where I have found that concerning as well but not so much now.

What are, for you, the main initiatives that need to be taken to improve gender equity? What would you like to see happening in the next ten years or so? Gender shouldn’t be an issue, it shouldn’t matter: it has nothing to do with your ability to do the job. How do we get there is the tricky question. I am a big believer in diversity, in which gender is only a part. The more diversity we have in the workplace, the greater the realisations that there is more than one way to lead effectively, to manage effectively or to get the job done. I think that, at the moment, our stereotypes, our definition, our vision of what is effective is based on what we have seen in the past, most of which are Caucasian and men. Making things change in such a way that it doesn’t disadvantage other people as well could be a challenge. We need to acknowledge there is an issue, we need to find the reasons why there is such an issue and then do something about it. Diversity requires the appreciation of different styles, exposure to different styles of effective managements will help enormously. What would you like to tell your PhD self? I don’t think there are many things I would change, I would say “Pursue your interests, be realistic, be prepared, believe in yourself, try to achieve your potential, bearing in mind that you have to take risks, take opportunities when they arrive, trust yourself, go for it!”. I think that’s what I have done. I don’t have any regrets, I don’t feel that I have made any bad decisions.

If you weren’t working in science, what would you do? Back in 1999, the division I was part of was going to separate, there was a lot of angst about what would happen to the group I was part of. I seriously thought about retraining at that point. I looked pretty seriously at medicine, I thought pretty seriously about becoming a teacher because both options were mobile, you could move from job to job quite easily. It was also more suited to part-time work so it would have been more family friendly as well. But now that I am getting closer to retirement (even if I still have time!), I think that, when I do retire, I wouldn’t mind going back to university and doing foreign languages and history. I would love to be able to speak foreign languages. I was quite good at humanities when I was at school, I have often thought that that’s what I would do for my retirement. I would love to teach myself French and Italian.

[remarkablewomeninscience]

“If you are enjoying what you are doing, you are probably doing it right”

Prof. Tamara Davis works at the University of Queensland, where she studies the properties of dark matter and dark energy.

Can you tell me a little about you? For example, how did you become interested in science? I was fascinated by space from an early age, I loved science fiction books, fantasy books. I remember being inspired by the space program and watching space shuttle launches. One of the earliest memories I have of being amazed by space was watching Halley’s Comet when I was a little girl. We went on a houseboat for a family holiday. Out there, away from city lights, the comet was spectacular, it was lighting half the sky and I remember looking up and thinking “Wow!”. There was never a decision made to do science, it was just one of these things that clicked up on me. It wasn’t like I stood up one day and said that I would become a scientist, it was just curiosity throughout my life that ended up leading me to being a scientist. All these tiny decisions that we make every day made me what I am at the moment. I never really decided what I would do. I really like the idea of relativity and bending of space and time, just hearing about these things was completely fascinating. Out of curiosity, I kept going, looking at more of these things. I didn’t get too much out of my way to find information about these things but every time I encountered them, I thought it was really, really cool. So when I had to decide on a university subject, I just chose a subject that looked like the most fun. I ended up focusing on astrophysics. Doing a PhD wasn’t really a big decision to make. It seemed really obvious. In your last year of undergrad, you do a research project. I hadn’t quite finished my research project by the end of the year so my supervisor said “Why don’t you stay and start a PhD with us, so you can finish up your project?”. And so I did! I had already thought that maybe I should keep going and do a PhD and I ended up staying at the same university because I had such an interesting project that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was a very easy decision, really, it was more about continuing what I had been doing. It was one of these tiny things, one of these little changes. It wasn’t so different from doing research as an undergrad. It didn't feel like a big deal.

What has been your career path? What drives you and makes you enjoy your current work position? What keeps you motivated when everything seems to fall apart? During the last year of m PhD, I attended a conference in Canberra, at Mount Stromlo. I asked quite a few questions during this conference and at the barbecue towards the end, a researcher from ANU came up and asked me what I would be doing when I finished my PhD. At the time, I said: “Actually, I am not entirely sure: I want to keep doing research and I know I am supposed to do a postdoc overseas. But I have to stay in Australia for another year because I am playing ultimate Frisbee. World championship will happen next year and I am vice-captaining Australia. So I need to stay here to train!”. He was like, “Oh, really?” and he made up a job for me. His name was Brian Schmidt and his team was one of the ones that discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. He had been approached by another team that was trying to design a space telescope but he didn’t have time to do the work himself. He thought he could employ me as a postdoc so I could communicate between the two teams and make sure that the knowledge from both teams would be shared for the project. I ended up being paid by a lab in the US but working in Canberra. It wasn’t a massive decision again, it was something that came up, I didn’t even have to apply for that job, it simply happened. The job after this one was actually the first job I had to apply for… I took ten years to do undergraduate and my PhD (I did a double degree of arts and science) and then I had this two-year postdoc position so the first time I had to apply for a job was twelve years after I finished high school! After I worked with Brian in Canberra, I went to the University of Copenhagen. They were starting a new centre, called the Dark Cosmology Centre. It was designed to try and understand dark matter and dark energy, which is the topic that I have been studying. I went over and I worked there for a couple of years and then moved back to Queensland in 2008. I only stayed for two years in Copenhagen but I would have probably stayed longer if there hadn’t been this job in Queensland. When I left, we arranged for the University of Copenhagen to pay two months per year of my salary, so I would go back for the European summer, continuing the collaborations. It has been extremely fruitful, we have generated a couple of very interesting new science results, and we have been one of the Top 10 science discoveries for 2011, as voted by Physics World Magazine, for example. I have had a bunch of Danish students and post-docs come to Australia and I have a student now doing her PhD both at UQ and Copenhagen. It was good that we kept those strong links. I love coming to work every day to try and figure out how the universe works. You get to work on something you are inspired by, you get to work with a bunch of inspirational people who are passionate about their work. It’s a privilege to work with the amazing colleagues that I have. The projects we work on take a long time, the shortest project I am working on will take five years. People often believe that it may be really frustrating not knowing the answer before these five years but actually, no! We learn a lot in the meantime. The big questions such as “What is dark energy?” or “How do the laws of physics work?” are not easily answered. There are a few a-ha moments but, no matter how hard you work, there is no guarantee you will have many of those. There is a lot of luck, as well as hard work, involved. I compare my work sometimes to playing computer games: the end result, like finishing the game, is important but is not the only thing. You are doing it because you are enjoying it. No matter what your occupation, if you enjoy what you are doing every day, you are doing something worthwhile. That’s something that I tell students as well: sometimes you hear people saying, you know, if I battle through this for years at university, even though I hate it right now, I will be qualified for something that is really good/I will earn a very high salary. And I am like, no, no, no, don’t think like that! If you battle through a university degree that you hate, then you will be qualified for something that you hate and that’s not the way to go! Do something you love. You’ll spend your whole life loving what you do.

You are a scientist but you also play sport at a high level. How do you manage to do both, what are the highlights of having these two elements together? I came back last month from Dubai where I captained the ultimate Frisbee Australian Masters team to bronze medal for the World Championship. I often put science and sport together. If I am going in a different part of the world to play Frisbee, it would be a waste not to talk to my collaborators in this part of the world as well. So I try to combine the two. Research is a fantastic flexible job if you need to go and do training. If you need to go for a run and you want to do that in the middle of the day, research makes it easier. The hours are long, you have to work very hard but the hours are also flexible so it’s actually good if you want to train or to study at the same time. I bring up sports sometimes when I give talks, especially for kids, because it’s important they know that you don’t need to give up everything you like to do science, you can be a well-rounded person doing a whole bunch of things in different areas of life. This breaks the stereotype of the scientific nerd. And to be honest, sport has made such a difference to my scientific career. The challenge and discipline that come from training for sport translate very well into studying. Being physically fit means that you are able to study more and work harder. And also, all of the leadership skills that you need when running a research project, you have to learn them somewhere and if you are running a sport team, balancing the egos of different people, trying to get the best out of everyone and making the team function as a whole, all of this transfers beautifully into research. For me, all of that education came from sport and that has been vitally important to my abilities in academia. People tend to only think about the physical part of sport but they really should realise there’s more to it than that!

When did you realize for the first time that there was a gender imbalance in science? I am in a very male-dominated area. A couple of years back, I was an invited speaker at a conference. We were twenty invited speakers there and there were only two women, which was actually over representing the number of women at the conference. It was less than 10% female for this 800 people conference, which can be confronting. Generally, I am a bit oblivious to this kind of things. Having played a lot of sports, where I have played against or with guys a lot and having competed in other areas of life, I have never felt fearful of competing with guys in academia, I am feeling confident with this. There has only been a couple of times where I have felt a tiny bit intimidated. That was once when I was doing a job talk, it was a kind of job interview but I had only be given a 24 hours warning, I almost had no time to prepare. That was in a big US institution, there were sixty people in the room watching me give this talk and zero females apart from me. That was intimidating. It’s only when I am the only female in the group that I really notice the issue. When I did see a couple of strong female professors, I was like, wow! This is something that I can do. I don’t know if I even consciously thought about it but when they came up to me and encouraged me and said “I think you should apply for this”, that meant a lot. It is surprisingly important to have this identification with someone that you think is like you: in that case, being a professor, a leader in science is something that you can do. They were just small things, really but they did made a big impression on me and I acknowledge that. I try to do as much of public outreach as I can, I go and speak to school kids, I mentor both male and female students because I think it’s really important. It’s not enough to only change females’ attitudes, it’s the male students who have to be equally accommodating, they have to look at female and think, “Of course that person is going to be a good scientist” and not think “Oh, that’s a female, it’s a bit weird”. I make sure I engage with the public, I engage with younger students, I make sure I am visible as a female scientist.

What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues? To be honest, I have had a fantastic run! I don’t feel like I had any major issue. I have never had anything less than fantastic support and encouragement from my colleagues. I have changed the research that I have been in several times, if not the research field, the detailed specialty and that means that I had to learn a new set of skills twice after my PhD. That’s what kept the research fresh. These things were challenges but I had to accept the fact that, if I was going to do this new part of research, I would have to be the student for a while, I would have to relinquish my expert status for a while and accept to do something I was bad at until I became good at it. Some people get really stressed about job insecurity, I actually loved the idea of travelling around the world, doing a postdoc, staying somewhere for a couple of years. Perhaps I was deluded by the fact that I had some self-confidence that made me not fear the fact that I could maybe not get another job. But also, I was aware from very early on that, if I wasn’t able to get another job in astrophysics, then there were heaps of other meaningful things to do. I was confident that, whatever I ended up doing would be something cool. So I was never stressed by the fact that I didn’t have security in my position.

What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of? Some of the research I did during my PhD and some of the research I published then have filtered out and have had an impact, I see some of the things that I wrote showing up in text books and in people’s talks. There is no attribution but there are some very specific things that I am relatively confident came from me.  That’s incredibly satisfying when you get that feedback directly from students or from researchers who tell me that I have had an influence. I have had postdocs come and talk to me at a conference, saying “I learned cosmology from one of your papers and that was the first time I actually understood the expansion of the universe”. And it’s very rewarding. I do have an email folder called Praise, which contains emails I received from people saying thanks for talks I gave, etc. I also have a folder containing correspondence with members of the public, about some of the articles I have written in popular science journals, things like Scientific American or appearances I have made on the radio. I have given a few talks at graduation ceremonies as well and there has been a couple of times where students have come up to me years later and said “That talk that you gave is what made me go and do a masters degree because I suddenly realized I was able to do it”.

You have had several awards in your career, such as a Tall Poppy Award and a L’Oréal Women in Science fellowship. Do you think they have made a difference? I wouldn’t have applied for these things if someone hadn’t told me that I should do it. I got the Nancy Millis Award in 2015, from the Australian Academy of Science, it’s given to one female scientist each year. That’s pretty cool and again, that’s something that I would probably not have applied for if I hadn’t been pushed by some of the people here. That’s been a really important thing. It started at the end of my PhD, I got the prize from the University of New South Wales for the best PhD thesis in science. That was something I applied for even if I thought I had zero chance of getting. And yet, I ended up getting it! It sure helped when I was starting off. If I had a word of wisdom to say to other female scientists, it’s to apply for things even if you have no hope of getting them: at the very worst, you get some practice writing an application and at the best, you never know what might happen. Apply for things, let someone else decide whether you’re good enough or not, don’t exclude yourself from the beginning by not putting your name in the hat.

Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor? The most important mentor for me has definitely been Brian Schmidt, he has been fantastically supportive. But I have had also several others, basically all male mentors because I haven’t worked with that many senior females but the encouragement and support from these men has been very important. It’s not a question of male/female, having strong mentors, that really build you up, that encourage you to apply for things, guide you on the right way to act and work as a scientist is really important. I am very appreciative of all my mentors all around the world.

What has been the most important advice you were ever given? Work on a project where the instruments have been built and finished is one good piece of advice that I was given. There is also something that my parents report. When I was in Year 3, I was doing relatively well at school and my parents asked the teacher if I should move more quickly through school and maybe jump a grade. The teacher gave them the advice that, I think, influenced my career more than anything else. That teacher said: “She is always going to be good at the book stuff. What she needs to do is to learn to talk to people and interact with other children. Make sure she doesn’t end up just being a book worm, get her outside, get her to play sports, get her to socialize with friends and the study will take care of itself”.

What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists? If you are enjoying what you are doing, you are probably doing it right. Do something that you are passionate about, and continue to do that throughout your entire life, even if it means changing what you are doing. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Don’t take things too seriously!

Self-confidence is not always easy to build. How have you dealt with confidence issues? Do you have tips/tricks that helped you with establishing yourself as a leader in your field? Everyone has issues with self-confidence! The impostor syndrome is a well-known issue. The more successful you get, the more you tend to think “How did I get here, do I deserve it?”. You will go through ups and downs in your research, occasionally (frequently?), things won’t work, occasionally things will go really, really well. When you are beating your head against a brick wall (figuratively!), I find it very useful to have something else in my life. Again, this is where sport plays a big role, as well as having good relationships with friends. You can have a crappy day at work and then you can go, win a game, do something really good on the field, have dinner with really good friends. This helps you realize that the bad things that happened during the day are not as important as you think. The bad three months when nothing is working is not the end of the world.

Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you? Work-life balance is definitely difficult, especially because a lot of scientists really, really enjoy what they do. I probably work most weekends but often work is the most interesting and exciting thing that I can contemplate doing. If I am really enjoying the research then it would be what I would do in my spare time no matter what! That can also be a little bit of a trap so I have occasionally decided that I wasn’t allowed to work during weekends. That works for a while but then the backload of work builds up and it ends up being more stressful than it is relaxing. What I do is that I allow myself stages where I go and work ridiculous hours and then, occasionally, I get to a point where I feel this is not maintainable anymore and I give myself permission to take a break and not work on the weekend, for example. I let my instinct tell me what I feel like doing, if I am feeling too stressed then I let myself not do work for a while. But actually, sometimes, the only way not to be stressed is to get the work done… If I am invited to do something (to go to dinner with friends, etc.), my rule is that I have to accept this invitation, even if there is work to do. As long as it’s not absolutely critical, then I have to accept the invitation to go and be social. That’s my little rule. It also helps that I have regular training for sport, it forces me to get away from my desk and do something with other people. Regular activity helps a lot, especially if it involves a team: you have to show up. Otherwise, you’re letting the team down.

What are, for you, the main initiatives that need to be taken to improve gender equity? What would you like to see happening in the next ten years or so? The biggest difference would be to have a change in attitudes, in which it will be expected that females take leadership roles and excel at science. I see that happening really clearly now. It seems to have stagnated for decades but I think we are hitting critical mass now. There is enough attention on it, there are enough female scientists who are doing excellent work and being exceptional role models: it’s becoming very clear that female do belong in research. That’s becoming much more widely acknowledged and things like unconscious bias that has been holding women back has now been studied, and is being discussed.  

What would you like to tell your PhD self? You are going to have heaps of fun, it’s going to be awesome! Take the opportunities that are handed to you, don’t have an aim that is too far ahead, enjoy every moment of what you are doing now. And, also, you have a mistake in section 2.1 of this paper, go and fix that!

And to finish, fortune cookie question! If you weren’t working in science, what would be your dream job? I always wanted to be the first person on Mars! I’d love to travel in space but I would also love to be working in either generating clean energies or improving people’s health. Or otherwise, improving equality of living circumstances around the world. There is a huge amount of things that we could do to help people.

[remarkablewomeninscience]

It has been quite a little while since the last post... Things have been a little bit crazy around here. But there are good news, very good news. I have been busy working on an exhibition that will be launched in exactly 47 days!

And here is a sneak peek:

“The League of Remarkable Women in Australian Science” exhibition will be held at CSIRO Discovery in Canberra from the 5th to the 31st of August. All the (many) interviews that have been done for this exhibition will be collated as an e-book. Isn’t this great?

More details coming very soon!

(photo credits: Ashton Claridge, Flinders University)

[remarkablewomeninscience]

“There is no satisfaction greater than tangibly making a difference in the lives of people”

Dr Josephine Birungi works at Biosciences eastern and central Africa at the International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi, where she is the Technology Manager.

Can you tell me a little about you? For example, how did you become interested in science? My first understanding of what it meant to work or how to earn a living was watching my father go to work at the Uganda Virus Research Institute, where he worked as a mosquito biologist. I frequently visited his office as a child and got fascinated by the kind of work he did and the various displays of mosquitoes, microscopes and other equipment. Being a child who looked up to my father, I didn’t need any other motivation when I started school. I had received my motivation boost by watching my father and I was going to excel at sciences no matter what! I truly exceled more in sciences and had little excitement with humanities. I viewed the world with the goggles of a scientist and everything just made sense and seemed more applicable from this perspective. My fascination with the sciences led me to question many things like why are we the way we are, why are humans different among many other questions. This inquiry led me to ultimately pursue higher education and a career in molecular genetics. A lot of my questions are being answered by this pursuance but I also acknowledge that many things are not to be answered because they can only be answered by a greater being who is God who I believe curved out my path to make a difference in the world by improving the lives of people. Outside work, my family is a great motivator to building my career in my adult life. I am married to Dr Vincent Ssembatya and I have been blessed with 4 lovely boys (13, 7, 6 and 3 years old). Bearing in mind that who I am today is strongly based on my childhood exposures, I strive to excel so that I can be an example to my boys and also so that my boys can grow up knowing that women are as good as men and deserve to be treated as such.

What has been your career path? Growing up, I wanted to be a pharmacist, having taken on sciences in high school. I was instead selected to take on a Bachelor of Science in Zoology, Botany and Psychology at Makerere University in Uganda. In my final year I took on Zoology and Psychology. I immediately pursued a Master’s degree in Zoology (Entomology) at Makerere University where I became interested in molecular biology. Just as I was completing my Masters write-up, I applied for a PhD fellowship with funding from DANIDA. I received the award and did a PhD in Molecular Genetics, Evolutionary Biology and Conservation Genetics at Makerere University/University of Copenhagen, Denmark, with specific interest in population genetics and phylogenetics of wildlife populations. I returned to Uganda to set up a DNA lab at Makerere University. Unfortunately there was a ban on recruitment during that time so I applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University School of Medicine. Having enjoyed the field of Entomology during my MSc, my postdoctoral work involved the application of genetic tools to understand the invasion biology of the dengue fever vector Aedes albopictus in the US, Brazil and Asia. I also worked on the population genetics of sand-fly species of South America. I also volunteered as a taxonomist at the Yale Peabody museum.

You did your PhD in Denmark, moved to Yale for postdoc and then came back to Uganda. Was it hard for you to find a position to come back? Were the decisions to go and then to come back hard to make? I admit I enjoyed my work at Yale. However from the research conducted on the dengue fever vector, I realised potential problems in the US were tackled before they actually arose. In this case, the dengue fever mosquito was invading the US and we needed to establish where they came from. We established that they came in from Asia which meant that there were high chances for dengue and other diseases spread by the mosquito to emerge in the US. In Africa we have multiple problems and normally we respond to problems when there are epidemics. I realised I had the skills to contribute towards solving some problems in Africa. While at Yale I applied for a position as Senior Scientist in an HIV vaccine trial lab in Uganda. I was to set up the laboratory and oversee all activities in an HIV vaccine trial laboratory. By then, 2002, there were few molecular biologists in the country so it was not easy to find somebody with my education background and experience. Much as HIV was not one of my fields of expertise, I took on the challenge because it was a major problem in Africa and more so Uganda. I joined the team because I wanted to make a contribution towards solving one of Africa’s problems and I had the training and skills to do so. The decision to leave Yale was made easy because my mind was set to make a contribution towards the lives of African people. I had challenges settling in, having been overseas for about 8 years. Life seemed a lot easier and predictable overseas. For example at Yale, when one needs a piece of equipment, it is just a phone call away and the item will be delivered to the lab the following day. In Africa they will promise to deliver after 6 weeks only to receive the item after 3-6 months. At the start it was frustrating and I admit several times I thought I had made a mistake in returning to Uganda. I needed to settle at work and bring to the table what I thought would make a difference to the lives of people especially the younger generation. I am forever thankful that I stayed on.

What are the specific challenges of your current position? I moved to Nairobi with my children when I joined my current position as Technology Manager at Biosciences eastern and central Africa based at the International Livestock Research Institute (BecA-ILRI Hub). My husband works and still lives in Uganda. It’s challenging living with the children on my own. The consolation is that seeing them motivates me to work even harder. I find peace of mind when home with them as their concerns are simple things in life. Challenges at my work place, nothing unusual, it’s probably too soon to think about them. It’s simply an enjoyable experience.

What drives you and makes you enjoy your current work position? There is no satisfaction greater than tangibly making a difference in the lives of people. My current work has provided a platform for me to contribute towards making a difference in livelihoods of African farmers. I believe in the potential of agriculture to eradicate poverty in Africa and to be in my current job is a privilege. My motivation stems from many fronts. One is that as a child, I saw myself where I am today and this gives me the conviction that this is my higher calling, it’s my destiny. On the family front, my children motivate me to keep going even when the tides are high. I know that they look up to me and the more I excel at what I do, the more influence I have on their lives, their work ethics and their motivation to dream big and excel in school. On the sidelines I have always had cheer leaders; I have always had people who believe in me. My mother has prayed unceasingly for as long as I remember and I have been blessed with siblings who have turned out to be my best friends.  Finally, on the spiritual front and most importantly, I was brought up in a Christian family and prayer has always grounded me when everything around me seems like a cobweb.

What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues? Surprisingly, my struggles have not been related to my gender. Growing up, our mother treated both the boy and girl child equally. We were all on the roster for cooking, cleaning the house and doing many of the house chores. I therefore rarely feel discrimated because of being a woman because I perceive myself more of a human being who can perform any task. My struggles have been more with ‘hearing me out.’ I happen to have worked in the same place where my father worked and it’s the same area I was brought up in. Joining the Uganda Virus Research Insitutute (which hosts the HIV vaccine trial unit and where I worked as Senior Principal Research officer) I would hear remarks in meetings like, ‘you were not born yet’. For that reason, I have had people questioning how I got there when I have been promoted to higher positions. I have had to prove myself by working hard and having my CV speak on my behalf. I‘ve also chosen to speak only where I know it will make a difference in my career/life, and for that reason I enjoy writing.

What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of? I returned to Uganda from Yale university and joined the Uganda Virus Research Institute-International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (UVRI_IAVI) HIV vaccine trial program. As the Senior scientist of the laboratory, working with the core laboratory facility for immunology laboratories in Imperial College London, I led the lab team in setting up a fully functional clinical trial laboratory, right from structure design, Good Clinical Laboratory Practice (GCLP) accreditation of a state-of the art molecular immunology and safety laboratory facility to becoming a model lab for Sub-Saharan Africa. The GCLP accredited facility was the first of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa. The accreditation led to international visibility of the laboratory attracting international collaborators with whom partnerships were developed. The lab was also involved in the training of young laboratory technologists to conduct assays and generate reliable and quality data (key for laboratories in Africa) required for clinical trials and also provided technical support on newly introduced vaccine trial technologies in their laboratories. Most if not all of the IAVI-supported labs we supported eventually acquired GCLP accreditation.

Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor? During my postdoc at Yale, I worked with Dr Leonard Munstermann. We were planning on submitting a grant application to NIH and while reviewing my CV he sat me down to edit it. By the time we were done, it had all the components of the old CV, only written better. Little did he know that by working with me on this CV, he made me appreciate the little things I did in life. It boosted my self-esteem and it has made a great impact in my life. It also marked the beginning of speaking less of myself and writing more. Dr Munstermann is a prominent scientist but was very modest. He would be surprised if he read this but yes he was a good mentor. I have mentored a number of students and people I didn’t know who would walk into my office asking for career advice having heard about my educational experience. Most have been men. Ladies in science are not that easy to mentor: they seem to have a lot more challenges to face in life like when to marry or get children versus their career.

What has been the most important advice you were ever given? Growing up, one of the mottos at home was, ‘whatever you do, do it well and you will succeed’. I can still see my dad seated by the dining table saying it. My mum would say, ‘tomalagakola kintu, waakiri kireke’ translated as ‘never undertake to perform any task for the sake of doing it, you rather leave it all together. ’ That she often told us when we rushed through house chores because we wanted to play. I still live by this advice and at times I am labelled a perfectionist-I’m slowly outgrowing it.

What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists? Be passionate and committed in whatever you do, and you will reach greater heights not ever imagined. Also do not blame the world for your shortfalls, always take responsibility and unceasingly pursue your goals.

Self-confidence is not always easy to build. How have you dealt with confidence issues? Do you have tips/tricks that helped you with establishing yourself as a leader in your field? I was blessed to be born in a family where everyone thought I was the best at what I did, so my confidence was boosted right from childhood. My first advice is for people to be the best cheer leaders to their children. Also try to be knowledgeable in your chosen field and open-minded to learn beyond your own field, as I believe that knowledge is power.

Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you? Work/life balance is a big challenge. How I deal with it is not to think about it. Achieving a work/ life balance is no mean feat. I don’t think I have actually achieved this balance but I am always working towards it. Ultimately it’s important to give Caesar what belongs to Caesar. I ensure that work time is dedicated to work and family time is dedicated to family. Also when I feel that one of the two seems not to be getting the attention it deserves, then I make an effort to make a change.

What are, for you, the main initiatives that need to be taken to improve gender equity? What would you like to see happening in the next ten years or so? Charity begins at home. Most of what/who we are stems from our life experiences especially growing up as children. I only recall one difference between boys and girls at home, the girls would kneel when greeting the elderly but not the boys. All else, there was equity. Now as a grown woman, I simply can’t take it when I’m told of the don’ts, especially those that come along with being a married woman. I think the education system right from the early years should train children on gender equality so that when they grow up to be parents they can bring up children that are blind to the social constructs of gender biases and inequalities. Currently gender equality seems to be preached more to an age group who can’t change since their culture is already engraved into them. For that reason gender equality is perceived more as a threat to men. In the next ten years I would like to see a society where gender equality is not talked about because, by then, the society would have changed with equality as a normal part of life.

If you could (or if you had to) start over again, what would you do differently? If I were to start all over again, I would be a stay home mum watching over my kids grow each day. I would probably have had more kids. That’s one thing I admire about my mum, much as she went to school she stayed home, took care of us and virtually reads through each of us.

What would you like to tell your PhD self? Much as I may not spend as much time at home like I would like to, attaining the PhD was worth it. I’ve met so many people, had lots of exposure and experiences in life.

And to finish, fortune cookie question! What’s the funniest/craziest thing that ever happened to you in the lab/field? During my PhD, I conducted field work in national parks and by then I and a team of other students were more interested in collecting samples whatever the risk. We collected tissue samples using a cross bow (bow and arrow). Once, we darted a female elephant and didn’t realize it was amongst a herd with young elephants. We were chased by angry elephants and narrowly escaped!

[remarkablewomeninscience]

"Challenge yourself to get out of your comfort zone!"

Dr. Maricelis Acevedo works at North Dakota State University, where she studies rust pathogen virulence evolution and the utilization of host resistance to manage cereal rusts. Her work is part of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, an international consortium working on wheat rust research and enhancement of wheat productivity worldwide.

Can you tell me a little about you? For example, how did you become interested in science? I was born and grew up In Puerto Rico. I have two sisters (I am a middle child). My mom was a social worker and ran a child care centre for low-income families. My dad was an agronomist at an agricultural experiment station of the University of Puerto Rico. While my sister and I were kids, my dad was working on his master’s degree and many of the Sunday family trips ended at the research station fields and laboratories. One of my most vivid childhood memories is waking up in the middle of the night and sneaking out of my room to check on my dad who was working on his stats homework at the dining table. My grandparents on my mom’s side of the family and my dad’s family both have small farms. As far as I can remember, I was always interested in science from a research point of view. I remember playing to be a medicine doctor and an agronomist as a kid.

What has been your career path? What drives you and makes you enjoy your current work position? What keeps you motivated when everything seems to fall apart? I went to the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez where I got a bachelor’s degree in Biology then a Masters in Agronomy in the area of Crop Improvement. I was working on common bean resistance to virus. Since my master’s project was on genetics of disease resistance I decided to get a PhD in Biology with a specialization in Plant Pathology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. My thesis project studied the virulence diversity of the bean rust pathogen and its co-evolution with wild beans in Honduras.   Before finishing my degree, I was offered a postdoctoral research appointment with the USA Department Agriculture in Aberdeen, Idaho where I began my career on cereal rust diseases, including some work on Ug99 resistance. Stem rust races of the Ug99 group are virulent on most of the current wheat varieties worldwide and are a major threat in Africa. This got my foot in the door of the international community working in East Africa for identification and utilization of new sources of resistance to combat this pathogen. In 2010 I accepted a tenure track faculty position as a wheat rust pathologist at North Dakota State University. In this position I get the opportunity to manage a research program, mentor graduate students and teach. One of the most enjoyable aspects of my position is to mentor students and provide leadership to the junior researchers in my program. I enjoy when new projects are born during an informal conversation with my students; sometimes I provide the initial idea but often, they bring a question or a concern and a new project is born! Moreover, the best moments so far have been those moments when the students or myself finally figure out the answer to a research questions; the ta-da moments! 

What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues? I have not felt discriminated against. However, I have struggled with the fact that in many circles women in science are being considered a necessary “quota”. Being a Hispanic female in science, I sometimes worry that I am seen as somebody that is just going to make you look on the group minority counts. Then sometimes without any particular reason, I question my role or my capability, I question the fact that I have been selected because I am an expert on a particular subject. So far I have made sure I feel comfortable with my role in a particular group. If I feel I am just used a “quota”, I reject the offer to belong to that group or I discuss my role to make sure my opinion is actually being sought. Under all circumstances, I do my best.

What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of? So far the personal achievement I feel the most proud of is to be able to have come this far in my professional career without losing touch with my family in Puerto Rico, making time for a personal life and staying physically and emotionally healthy despite the demands of my job. On the professional side of things, I feel very proud that my science research reflects my social values. I feel proud that ultimately the science I work on will end up in the farmers’ fields. I have always committed to projects that could be applied/used by farmers or would impact yield protection to ensure food security and better utilization of inputs (such as fungicides).

If you could (or if you had to) start over again, what would you do differently? If I could go back to my graduate school years or even post-doc years, I would have spent more time learning about and getting involved with transfer of technology and knowledge from the scientists to the policy makers and the general public. I would have sought opportunities to get training in policy making, international agriculture, and international development. I really think a lot of good science never sees the “daylight” because scientists don’t/can’t communicate effectively to the public their knowledge and the importance of their discoveries. Moreover, I think more scientists should be involved in communication with the public and the media. This would help preventing misinformation and improve the perception of science-based practices that could improve people’s lives. 

What would you like to tell your PhD self? Don’t forget what you are passionate about. Remember why you chose this career path!

Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor? My master’s degree and PhD advisors both taught me the importance of doing science that impacts and can improve people’s life especially in the developing countries. Over the past five years, I have mentored several graduate students as a thesis supervisor or as part of a thesis committee. Closest to my heart is mentoring the four graduate students in my laboratory. It’s a great responsibility and I don’t take it lightly.

What has been the most important advice you were ever given? An emeritus professor once told me to follow my heart about my career path. And so I did!

What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists? Challenge yourself to get out of your comfort zone, be part of the conversation!

Self-confidence is not always easy to build. How have you dealt with confidence issues? Do you have tips/tricks that helped you with establishing yourself as a leader in your field? You can learn a lot about your career path by talking and spending time with senior scientists that you admire not only as a scientist but also as a person. You will learn what it takes to “survive “and succeed but it will also teach you that these scientists you admire have fears and concerns just like you. They have failed many times before they reach the point they currently are. It is important to take part (no matter if that is just to seat at a meeting) on administrative/professional committees and learn the ins and outs at an early stage. The way I look at it is the more you know, the less you fear!

Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you? I believe in having a friend or a partner that I feel completely comfortable asking for help when I need it.  I also strongly believe in picking my battles and my chores and outsource/ get the most of the system to better utilize my time. I go grocery shopping online (I sometimes order my groceries while waiting at the airport), pay my bills electronically, listen to audiobooks, have the shortest commutes I can, use apps to stay organized and keep track of deadlines. These are all small things that help me. Surround yourself with a support network (other females and males) from different aspects of your life (work and outside of work), people who understand your situation and can be supportive. If you can afford it, use professional services so that you can dedicate more time to the essentials such as family and friends. This also helps to find time to stay healthy (cooking at home, exercising and spending time with/for yourself).

What are, for you, the main initiatives that need to be taken to improve gender equity? What would you like to see happening in the next ten years or so? I hope to get past the 20:80% female: male ratio at work so that we can be seen as professionals or scientists, etc. and not as female scientists, etc. Equal pay for equal jobs must be the norm. I would also like to see flexible schedules and day care on site as part of the new norm at work so the families are welcome. By doing so, there will be no need to choose between being a professional or looking after your kids so that people can have emotionally healthy families.

And to finish, fortune cookie question! Is there a little something on your desk/bench that you have carried with you from lab to lab as a kind of talisman? What is it? A satellite image (from Google Earth) of my family farm in Puerto Rico!

[remarkablewomeninscience]

I couldn't wait to tell you about that. Well, actually, I had to wait (and it was very hard)! But it's now official, the wait is over.

So... there will be a "League of Remarkable Women in Australian Science" exhibition as part of the National Science Week this year! This will be a great challenge, a new and thrilling adventure! And it means even more interviews...

This is very exciting news and I cannot wait to share more details with you. Stay tuned!

[remarkablewomeninscience]

You may have noticed that the League’s publication rate is a bit lower than usual at the moment… The last couple of months have been quite hectic, but the good news is that there are more interviews on their way! We also have some very exciting projects as well, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, I thought that it could be nice to give you a quick insight into who is behind the League and how it started.

Behind the League, there is… me, Anne-Sophie, a French post-doc working on photosynthesis at the Australian National University. I run the interviews (by email, by phone or face-to-face) (and I absolutely love doing that!), transcribe and edit them on my spare time. But behind the League, there is also Amanda, Angie and Britta, Hannah and Sarah, Ana, Gabrielle, Katherine and Yileen, Staci and Naomi, whose advice, help and support make all the difference!

It all started as a very simple idea, almost a very naive idea. What about looking at personal stories instead of numbers when it comes to gender issues in science? What about focusing on positive, concrete examples? After a few hours of serious Googling, it turned out that this hasn’t really been done. A few emails and chats later, the first interview was on its way! Every interview is like an adventure and it’s one of the best feelings ever!

So thank you very much again for being part of this project! As always, if you have suggestions for an interview, please send them to: [email protected]. And stay tuned for the next interview!

[remarkablewomeninscience]

"It will become increasingly important that you have a profile as a scientist but also that you have a reputation online because that’s where everybody goes now"

Dr Rachael Dunlop works at the University of Technology, Sydney where her research focuses on motor neurone disease. She is also a science communicator.

  You started a career in advertising and design before moving into science. Can you tell me a little about that?

When I finished high school, I wanted to go into art school but also study science at university. I decided to go and do art school first. So I did a year of drawing and photography and then I went on and did an associated diploma in graphic design. I worked as a copywriter in advertising for a number of years then as a graphic designer. It was probably after ten years working in this area that I started to get a little bit bored with design stuff. So I decided to go back to university and do the science degree that I had always wanted to do.

It wasn’t really a hard decision because I have always loved both science and art. I was apparently starting to annoy my friends a lot because I was talking about these popular science books I was reading, all these interesting facts about viruses and bacteria... My friends were like ‘Oh God! You should totally get back to uni, you’re so annoying!’. So it was kind of a natural thing for me to do it, it was just a way to study things I was interested in in a more formal manner.

I started from scratch because my art degree wasn’t at the university level. I was going to lectures with kids who just finished high school the year before. Lecturers would assume that we all remembered such and such equations or the periodic table but I didn’t remember any of these things because it was ten years ago. On top of that, I was studying biology, which I had never done at high school. So I had to borrow my sister’s textbooks from high school and learn what a cell was, all the basic terminology of biology I had no idea about.

I was a full time student. In fact, I relocated from Sydney to Adelaide, where my parents lived. I couldn’t afford to live in Sydney and study full time. A lot of people say to me that it required a lot of courage but I would do it again. It was extremely difficult; I was absolutely terrified I was going to fail university. I actually worked extremely hard that first year because I was basically playing catch up with things that people assumed I should know. So I became extremely disciplined, I would allow myself to go out one night a week only. I had to study every night until it was midnight, I didn’t take any holiday time. I went from a time when I worked eight hours a day and would then come home or go to gigs to only going out one night a week and studying constantly.

It was very difficult but it was very rewarding. I just loved the information I was absorbing. In those days (even if it wasn’t that long ago), we didn’t have the Internet access we have now so I would spend hours in the library. You would spend hours there and often fall asleep in the library and try to sneak in food when you are not supposed to… Because I was so fascinated by the area of biology, I would read extra things as well; I would pick up extra books and read about T-RNA synthetases just because I thought they were cool. There was never a point where I wanted to stop.

I ended up going all the way through from undergrad to Honours to PhD so I did eight years in a row before I surfaced at the other end and was able to breathe again. I did my undergraduate degree at Adelaide University and, because I really enjoyed toxicology and pharmacology, I did my Honours degree in the department of experimental pharmacology and toxicology. I then moved to Sydney to do my PhD which I finished in 2005. I have been a post-doc in Sydney the whole time, at the Heart Research Institute and then at the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS).

  You are a postdoc but also a very active science communicator. How did that start? How do you manage these two sides of your career?

People say to me that it is weird that I used to do design and art and that now I do science because ‘they are opposing things’. But they are not! They are both about problem solving, you try to find a way to solve a problem but you just have two different sets of tools. In design and advertising, you use a pen and a paper and try to think of a way to come up with a smart, clever advertising campaign. In science, you use pipettes and cells or whatever else but it’s the same process. When you think about it, being a science communicator makes sense. I spent the first part of my career being a communicator: I was writing ads for TV and radio, designing advertising campaigns for big companies. I have learned to write as a copywriter and then to design as a graphic designer so it just made sense for me to start trying to communicate science. I already had these skills of writing and breaking down complicated information in simple language.

I think I first started when I was doing my PhD. To earn a bit more money, I would design scientific posters for people. In my spare time, I put together scientific papers in a digital form and got them printed out for people so they didn’t have to do that. Then, about four years ago, we ran out of funding for my postdoc position so I started working part time as a scientific communicator for the Heart Research Institute. I would write their press releases, I kept their website updated and ran their social media. It was just natural progression to combine these two skill sets given that I had them.

I don’t have any official role as a science communicator at UTS but I am called upon frequently to be held up as an example by the media people. We do have media training here for scientists and they often ask me to come and speak on a panel and they do include some of the interviews that I have done on television as examples of how you can go about communicating science.

If I have to travel for my communication work, I do that on my own time. I recently was invited speaker at a conference run by the Oil and Gas industry; I took holidays to do that because it wasn’t really work-related. What I was hoping to achieve was to maybe attract some funding to our research but I had no guarantee so I had to take leave. This is commonly the way, if I have to travel for communication stuff, I generally have to take leave. If I were employed part-time as a postdoc and part-time as a communicator, it wouldn’t be an issue but I’m not. I don’t get paid to communicate and until it gets to this official recognition amongst the faculty, which I think it’s going to take some time, then it will have to stay that way.

What are the specific challenges of being a science communicator, especially of being involved in science communication online?

I refer to myself as a Scientific Skeptic which refers to people who use the scientific method to explore extraordinary claims (NB: we are not science deniers a la climate change sceptics and the co-opting of this word for “denier” does confuse matters). There is a large community of us who spend time explaining science and refuting false claims. When I first got involved in analysing claims made by people who said magic water could help cure cancer, I had a lot of people personally attacking me, really nasty personal attacks. Much more experienced members of the community would step in and say ‘Look, you leave it to us, we’ll help, we’ll sort that out, don’t you do anything about it’. I observed and learned this way.

You have to very quickly develop a thick skin when you have an online profile or you just have to turn off the computer. People who are keyboard warriors have the benefit of the anonymity of the Internet so they can make up fake names, fake profiles, whatever they like because there are no consequences for them. The best way to deal with it is just to rise above it, or calmly refute it. You have to be a better person than them, take the high road. You have not to attack them back; you have to keep answering calmly, maturely and explain things well. You have to consider that other people will read that too, not just the person you are directing it at. For example, if someone says that vaccines are toxic and they will kill children, it’s not helpful to say to this person ‘You’re just a stupid idiot’: other people will read this conversation and they might be able to learn something if you take the time to explain that it’s not true because such and such. Of course, you also have to maintain your reputation. You have to learn to not press ‘Send’ on emails. You write the email and you save it and then you go to sleep. And the next day, you read it again and you think ‘Um, OK, maybe I won’t send that’. So you have to learn to breathe and walk away from your computer. That’s the key! I made some mistakes in the early days, where I would lash out at people without thinking and this was naïve of me. But I’ve learnt from that and I don’t do it anymore, as it’s counterproductive and only serves to damage your reputation.

I get a lot of abusive emails, abusive tweets and people write nasty things about me online but, you know, that’s just part of the territory that comes with having a public persona. I have piles of hate mail, I think most people with an online presence do. You come to deal with that and you just don’t read them, generally. I have never received anything that where I felt my personal safety was really at risk, but people will try their hardest to ruin your reputation. There was an incident at my university a few years ago where this occurred. I wrote a piece that was published on the university website and a troll came along and made false and therefore defamatory remarks about me. That was pretty upsetting because the university refused to remove it. The only thing I could do was get a lot of people to come in and refute the statements.

  Are you also involved in science education?

I have been a member of a group called ‘Mystery investigators’ with my friend Richard Saunders. We were going to schools to do an hour long show using science to explain the mysterious and the unusual. We talked about ghosts and explained how they can be explained by science and evidence. We used testimonials to demonstrate how people can just say anything they like about their abilities and that you always should ask for evidence. Teaching kids to apply critical thinking to everything around them is essential. If you are equipped with the ability to critically analyse information, you are going to be much better off.

We have done that for kids as young as 4 to up to 16, 17. We found that they loved it, especially young kids. I have done that a number of years although this year, my research has been so intense that I haven’t had time to do it.

I think doing such things is very important because traditional science education tends to beat the curiosity out of kids. When they are young, they are so interested in science, they love dinosaurs, they can name any single type of dinosaur. And then you put them in a classroom, you show them how to balance an equation and it just bores the hell out of them. They lose that love and that curiosity about science. Science is not like that. I am all for kids interacting with scientists and having scientists going to the classroom to blow things up and fill balloons with liquid nitrogen or all that sort of stuff because it keeps them interested.

  What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues?

I would say, similar to many, many people, I had a very challenging PhD. My relationship broke down just towards the end when I was about to write up. It is sadly common; it seems lots of people ends up breaking up with someone during their PhD! That was extremely difficult because I had to still try to complete my PhD on time, which requires a lot of concentration and hard work. I am not exactly sure how I got through that, to be honest! Perhaps what doesn't kill you makes you stronger?

  What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of?

One of them would be getting that piece of paper with ‘Doctor’ written on it. My PhD was extremely challenging so that was a massive achievement.

Recently, in the last four years or so, I have shifted the focus of my research from heart disease to motor neurone disease (MND). It has been extremely challenging but extremely rewarding. I now get to work in a consortium with people who are 100% dedicated to finding a cure for non-genetic MND. Throughout that work, I have been lucky enough to meet patients, carers, people who raise money for this disease. I am so proud of being a part of this community, people are so passionate and so driven towards finding ways to ameliorate or prevent or cure this disease.

We made a big breakthrough last year. We made a discovery about one of the mechanisms that could trigger the disease in susceptible people. That received a huge amount of media coverage and it resulted in Phase I clinical trials beginning in the US. I am extremely proud of that. There is potential that this discovery might actually help patients whose options are currently very limited. There is one drug that extends life expectancy for a few months but for most of MND, there is no known cause, there is no known cure. And you die within five years on average. If we can find anything that could slow the progression of this disease and turn it into a chronic disorder instead of a death sentence, then I would be very happy to retire tomorrow.

  Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor?

I was never appointed a mentor during my PhD or my early post doc years and now that I have someone I can rely on, I wish I had! But the labs I was in didn’t offer that and I think that really needs to be something that should be done. Everyone should get access to this kind of support. I am lucky I have a mentor now who is brilliant support to me and who is independent to my workplace. I get a lot of support from this person who has helped me through periods of stress and self-confidence issues.

I try to be a mentor, a role model. I try to do that as much as possible with students. I try to be as honest with them as I can and offer them support when they need it. But you have to be extremely careful with students too. If you are supervisor to a student, you don’t want to become friends with them because that crosses the line of supervisor to student and then it’s very difficult for them to respect you as a senior person.

  What has been the most important advice you were ever given?

That’s a good question, I don’t know!

  What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists?

Find yourself a mentor and if you can’t find one yourself, ask your student supervisor to find you somebody. Because, especially during your PhD, you are going to need a lot of emotional support and guidance.

If you are starting a PhD, talk to other people and find out their progression, did they go overseas straight after their PhD, if not, why not? Don’t just go through your PhD thinking that it is all going to end up fine. You must plan ahead and certainly, don’t do a PhD just because you want to put Dr in front of your name! It’s extremely difficult; it’s often a disaster emotionally. If you are going to do it, make sure you need it for what you want to do in the future.

You really need to sit back and have a good hard think about where you want to go with your career and also think (I know it’s very boring) about finance. How you are going to live if you take a career in research? If you start a PhD, it’s going to take you three and half years, probably four years. In that time, your friends will have been working and earning, I don’t know, let’s say $90.000 a year. You are going to come out of that less $280.000 that you could have earned. So you have to be practical. You might want to do a PhD because you think that science is fun but it’s hard work and you need to have really good reasons to do it.

  Self-confidence is not always easy to build. How have you dealt with confidence issues? Do you have tips/tricks that helped you with establishing yourself as a leader in your field?

Well as I have said above, (and I can’t emphasize this enough), a mentor can help with all these things. Whilst support from colleagues and mentors is critical, I am a scientist so at the end of the day, thus I am plagued by impostor syndrome – most of us are! We are taught from the very beginning to be humble, to never say anything is 100% true, there is always a standard deviation plus or minus something. We don’t make black and white statements. But ultimately self-confidence comes from doing good work and getting grants and publishing often and that requires a strong, supportive team and this is where things can go very wrong.

One of the things that I find concerning in research, (especially where students are concerned), is that there are supervisors that are known not to be good people to work for, they are know not to treat students very well. It is known but no one speaks up. It’s far too common and it shouldn’t be happening. It would be nice if people were a bit more honest about those things, if people were telling you ‘Maybe you’d like to think about another supervisor instead, just because you might have a more productive PhD’. I guess there needs to be more accountability particularly in academia. They turn a blind eye to this stuff and they expect you to figure it out for yourself. This is not helpful and needs changing.

  Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you?

I suppose it’s not as complicated for me as it is for some other women in science because I don’t have children so I am able to work late and not feel guilty. I work long hours, basically. I work on week-ends. There is always time in between running experiments. You can update a website quickly or quickly write a blog post. Cells take time to grow and experiments take time to mature. You can put a centrifuge run for 30 minutes and quickly do a tweet in the meantime. There are a lot of little pockets of time during the day that I can use.

I don’t really have rules in terms of work/life balance. I don’t feel that it’s too overwhelming. My partner is a web-developer so he is often tinkering away even if we are on holiday. I spend a lot of time on planes so I can always do things while travelling. Generally speaking, there is always time to do little bits here and there and it doesn’t feel much like work either.

  If you could (or if you had to) start over again, what would you do differently?

I don’t think I would change things. I mean the only issue is I didn’t have an income for 8 years and this has been a bit of a drag! Apart from that, it’s fun to combine my science skills and art/design to do science communication. I loved both these careers and I still, obviously, love what I am doing now. I particularly like the fact that I am able to combine these skill sets now for my science. I do love going and talking to people, I do love communicating my science and I think I am extremely lucky to have these skills I obtained from my design and communication career so I am able to do that effectively.

One of the biggest problems that we have as scientists is that we just don’t communicate well.  This is becoming a much bigger issue and it’s only going to get worse. The more money the government takes away from us, the more we will have to seek it elsewhere. And if we can’t communicate to people what we are doing, they are not going to want to give us money. If you can’t walk into a room full of business people and explain to them in five minutes your complicated science project, how can you hope to attract money from them? It will become increasingly important that you have a profile as a scientist but also that you have a reputation online because that’s where everybody goes now. Whether the dinosaur academics like it or not, that’s where people look for information. You must be able to talk about your work and you must be able to break it down into 200 words that people can understand without making it full of jargon. The only thing that discourages me about this is academia and science have a long way to go to work out how to measure this. For example if I write a blog post that gets 1 million hits this does not count towards my academic record. I don’t get rewarded for designing and running the work website, with the exception of a small section on some grants that ask for outreach this is still not something that is rewarded and whilst this continues people won’t be encouraged to do it.

I think scientists should be made to publicise and talk about our work – especially if the tax payer is funding it. We have an obligation to inform people how and where their money is being spent.

  And to finish, fortune cookie question! Is there a little something on your desk/bench that you have carried with you from lab to lab as a kind of talisman? What is it?

I have one of these Giant Microbes; I have a measles, whose name is Measles. He has been with me since 2008 and tends to come with me to every lab I go to (he sits on my desk). Actually Measles goes with me to conferences. He’s been to the Middle East, he goes to Doha once a year and he recently went to Wyoming. He is a very well-traveled Measles.

I also have a wombat that lives above my desk. I have an office with a window and people tend to knock on the window. I put a sign asking people not to knock but it didn’t work. So I now have a wombat with a sign saying ‘Don’t knock on this window or the wombat gets hurt’. It works, it works much better actually!

  This interview has been performed as part of a project with the ANU Gender Institute.

[remarkablewomeninscience]

"Give it a go, don't be afraid! You don’t have to win every time"

Dr Mary Myerscough works at the University of Sydney, at the frontier between maths and biology, investigating mathematical models for atherosclerosis and carcinogenesis, as well as self-organisation in social insects.

  First, can you tell me a little about you? For example, how did you become interested in science? What has been your career path?

I guess I always found maths soothing which is probably different from a lot of people’s experience! Doing maths, you can always sit down and work something through in a very focused way. It’s nice to block the world out and do that sometimes. That’s one reason why I ended up in maths. And I like see mathematics working, it’s a tremendously powerful way to look at the world. This is why I ended up in applied maths. Initially, I thought it would be physics because in school, physics was really the only place where you saw this happening, you saw the maths working and telling you things about the world. But then I did a third year course in mathematical biology, which I loved. And I decided that was what I wanted to do. I did my undergrad and Honours year at the University of Sydney, working on a project looking at cellular motion. At that point, there wasn’t a lot of math biology being done in Australia and I wanted to do a PhD overseas. But I didn’t want to leave immediately after my Honours degree and so decided to spend 18 months doing Masters by research.

Then I moved overseas and did a PhD in quite a big math biology group in England, working on a model for pattern formation by chemotactic cells. I really enjoyed being part of a large group like that. Because my supervisor had such a big group, there were lots of visitors coming. Over the course of the time I was there, we basically met a whole lot of important people in the discipline. Looking back, it’s quite amazing to have met all these people. But I missed Australia. I like the warmth, I like the people, and it was a lot more relaxed than England in many ways. I was there during the Thatcher years and it was quite hard.

I came back and went to work at Macquarie University as a post-doc in the School of Chemistry, studying ecological-type problems with mathematics. So I was kind of a walking scientific identity crisis. I did that for 18 months and then they offered me a job here at the University of Sydney. I think there are both advantages and disadvantages in coming back to where you were an undergraduate student. I was very fortunate, and I think particularly as a woman, to get a permanent position comparatively young. That made a lot of difference: I had this security and I could try all sorts of things. You still have to think about the next publication but not quite in the same way. I hear that from young staff who have been employed permanently in the School of Maths and Stats here; they say that everything is much easier because they don’t have the huge tenure-track barrier they get in the US.

  What drives you and makes you enjoy your current work position? What keeps you motivated when everything seems to fall apart?

I am a mathematician but I am really quite an applied mathematician. When I am talking to mathematicians, I tend to say that I am a ‘dirty’ mathematician. I am not so much involved in proving mathematical facts as taking mathematical ideas and applying them in different areas of biology. For many years, I worked on social insects, ants and bees and termites. How do the individual behaviours we observe go together to make the behaviour of a colony or hive? Recently, I started working on more medical problems. Together with a postdoc, I am working on the initiation of cancer in cell sheets (like skin or the inside of your mouth) and I also have started a project looking at the initiation of atherosclerosis.

One of the joys of this is working with experimental scientists. For the bees, I worked with biologists at Sydney University and Macquarie University. For the cancer stuff, I work with a researcher in the Faculty of Medicine at Sydney University and for the atherosclerosis; it actually came as a mathematical problem. I had to find experimental people who were interested in working with me. I think it’s sometimes difficult for people to approach mathematicians, we all come in different flavours and you need to find the right person. And it’s true going the other way. I went to several atherosclerosis conferences and met a lot of people there. When at a meeting, you look and you talk to lots of different people and suddenly you feel like “Yep, I could work with you because you are thinking about similar problems in similar ways”.

This is the first year I have been full time since 1994. When my children were growing up, my husband was able to be fractional (that is, part-time) for a short period of time in his job but I had that flexibility on a continuing basis so I remained on a fractional appointment. And then, as my children grew older, so did my parents and so I remained part-time. My brother works at a high level in the finance industry and so it would have been difficult for him to be part-time to help our parents. So it’s not really a gender based thing for me, it’s more a sector of employment-related issue. I think universities are conscious, at least Sydney University is, that staff have lives outside work, which the university needs to respect. When my mother died, my brother rang up his office and said ‘I won’t be at work tomorrow, my mother just died” and they answered “But you’ll be in to work the day after, won’t you?” Sometimes you have to see the other side to realize how lucky you are.

I haven’t been teaching this year because I have been on a research fellowship from the uni but normally I would teach and do research and admin. There are series of equity fellowships at Sydney Uni that basically help relieve you of your teaching for a year. They are given in case of disability or for people coming back from periods of caring, that’s for men and women. And then, there are some fellowships for women in leadership, I am on one of them. They are for people who are at the point where they could apply for promotion but their research could just do with a bit of extra time.

It’s really easy to let your research languish because of all the other things you have to do. I have always had graduate students and honours students. They are people who need my care and attention so that helps the research. But I think it’s also a matter of working out when you can cut out some time where your mind is not crowded with other things. When things are going well, I can get up at 5 in the morning and work through until 7 and then I look at my emails, look at my phone messages and then my brain fills up with other stuff. It’s actually about saying for yourself ‘Yes it’s important, my research matters”. In some way, it’s harder to set goals for research than it is to say “I have to give this lecture to 500 first year students at 11am” or “I have to have these admin things done” but it’s important to keep reminding yourself that research has to be done as well as anything else. It’s saying to yourself “Concentrate on the important things, don’t simply get sucked in by the urgent things”.

I love it when I can spend a whole day on research or even a whole week on research! I have been doing quite a lot of admin this year because the university changed its policy on assessment which had significant implications for what we do in Maths and Stats. I have been chair of the School of Maths and Stats Learning and Teaching committee: people on ARC fellowships (and our School has a lot of these) cannot do big admin jobs, so the Head of School has only limited options to fill in these positions. I went away to visit colleagues overseas for a month. The joys of having children grown up enough to do that! Day after day, I got up in the morning, had breakfast, cycled in to work, sat at my desk pretty much all day and left at 6 or 7pm, went back home, had dinner and went to bed and did it all over again the next day. There were people I talked to during the day but basically that’s what I did and it was just wonderful! I was having such a blast of a time because I was working 10 or 12 hours a day… It’s simply awesome to be able to give this focus to the work, particularly when the creative juices are flowing, you know you’re writing well, you know you are doing a good analysis, you’re thinking well at the intersection of the science and the maths!

What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues?

There were some very difficult years. I didn’t choose my children carefully, by which I mean if you really want to progress you make sure that you have children who are calm, sociable, who love going to school and enjoy going to after-school care and staying with friends, who are never sick, who do their homework without any issue, etc. Neither of my children were really happy at school at various times. I have memories of my son as we drove back from primary school bursting into tears halfway home. I thought “You poor thing!” You are dealing with people who are not terribly happy and you can’t just abandon them. It makes it difficult because there is a lot of angst at home, you cannot have long days.

My daughter didn’t like high school very much at some points so I was driving her to school every day to make sure she’d make there on time. But then she did a lot of extra-curriculum things, she really enjoyed that. They are beautiful kids and they are both doing so well at uni and having a really good a time there. So everything turned out well but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.

I never realised at the time but I had a functional gut disorder which was a very low level thing for many years but just made me a little bit flat and depressed. And then it started to ramp up. I identified the issue around 2008 and stopped eating what was causing me trouble.  Once I did that, it felt like the sun came out again.

Because of all these things, I thought I would be a senior lecturer for ever. I just couldn’t get over the hurdle to where I could reasonably apply for promotion and I think that was a very difficult time. But my children grew up, I cut out of the diet things that were causing me grief and the sun came out and I was able to think and work well again.

Then we got to a very difficult stage because my mother got sick. At one stage, I was working four days a week and helping my father care for her four days a week. I still had school aged children at home and a husband who had long commutes and worked long hours. I knew we just needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other and we would get through it. It wasn’t a kind of brain fuzz; we knew what we had to do. Things do finish but often there is a recovery period needed. I think there are times you look back and you get this feeling of accomplishment, when you survived something really tough. And not only survived but made a good job out of it.

For so many years and next year is going to be another one, when you start the year, you look at the calendar and you think: “My teaching allocation is this, this and this, I really do need to get these papers out, and there are all these others things and I don’t know how I am going to do it!”. All you can do is plan as much as you can and keep putting one foot in front of the other. And if the whole house of cards falls apart, well, you know, you’ll deal with it when it happens!

  What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of?

I am mainly proud of my children but it’s not all my work, it’s a lot of their work and other family members and other people too!

Professionally, there a couple of papers that just distilled a lot of maths and science nicely mixed together. There is a paper I published in 2003 in Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B on honey bee house-hunting. I remember sitting there and suddenly thinking ‘This is how this works!’ and writing that down immediately. It encapsulated a lot of observations about honey bee behaviour during house-hunting and it was elegant. The science was elegant as well. I think I am very, very excited about the work we are doing now about atherosclerosis and one of the things that fascinates me about this is that we start with some quite complicated cell biology and then we write down some quite complicated equations which my graduate students often solve (because they come to the conclusion that they may be better than I am when it comes to writing a decent computer program) (and I think they are right!). But then that asks another lot of questions which turn out to be quite mathematical, about why certain types of cells and processes really matter. Mathematically, we are asking why we get such and such mathematical structure we see when we analyse these equations. These are important because they say how things will evolve if you have an atherosclerotic plaque in your artery, whether that plaque will regress and heal up or go on progressing and become dangerous. We go from biology to the mathematical model, then back to biology then back again to mathematics, to really, inherently mathematical questions. It’s fascinating.

  Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor?

I didn’t really have mentors in research and when I look back, this is something I would have benefited from. Partly because I was (and I still am) working in a fairly male-dominated field and it makes it harder not to be just a little bit of an outsider. I had male and female colleagues whom I was able to talk to and I kind of knew what needed to be done. Often it’s a matter of confidence and support. Within Australia, there have been women professors of mathematics; we have a Laureate Fellow in Mathematics in our School. I had a number of friends and contacts who were working in male-dominated fields such as chemistry, physics or maths. There were other women around, not many. Even if they weren’t senior women, you knew you weren’t alone.

In teaching, I was really well supported. When I came to the University of Sydney, there were some very able teachers who encouraged me. Having the same in research could have made a difference.

Of course, you are always a mentor for your graduate students. I have two post-docs at the moment. These are people that, structurally, you should mentor. On a less formal note, I drink a lot of tea so I often chat to people in the tea-room. In this way, I seem to have a lot of informal discussion with other staff. Then sometimes, if they have questions, they will come to my door and we will discuss issues.

  What has been the most important advice you were ever given?

I don’t know! And it’s pretty interesting that I don’t know! I mean, I think fundamentally, a really strong value I grew up with in my family is ‘People are important and service is important’. It doesn’t matter what you achieve professionally, if you do it by walking over people, what does that say about you? And then after that, you have to live with yourself. So I think it’s essential to respect other people. And it pays off as well.

The first year student in your tutorial who is not doing so well is as important as the Honours student that will win the University medal. It flows on things like having a collegial attitude, how you operate as part of a department versus an ‘I am here for me’ attitude. If enough people have this collegial attitude, then you have a happy environment rather than an aggressive, very competitive environment.

  What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists?

Be strategic and savvy but also, ‘Give it a go!’, put your head on the block sometimes and see what happens. One of my current graduate students has produced beautiful results because he is not afraid to give it a go. Even when I say that we don’t really need this or that, he just goes and gives it a try.

You don’t have to be certain that’s going to work. You don’t have to win every time. Sometimes, you should be playing the long game rather than planning every single movement. Again, this has been very much the case with my children. It’s not about which high school you will go to, it’s where you want to end up. If you want to be a post-graduate then it’s your Honours year that matters, if you want to be a professional musician, there are other markers along the way. You can give them a go. You don’t know until you try. Don’t die wondering.

The other thing is to talk to people, to not be afraid to talk to people. This is something I found difficult as a younger woman. Don’t be afraid of asking, ask for opportunities, ask people questions about what they do.

  Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you?

I don’t know if I worry less but I worry differently. I worry less about the details probably because I developed a strategy which I call the 80-20 strategy: I do the 80% that takes 20% of the time and after that I think that if it doesn’t have to be perfect and that, if good enough is good enough, then that’s fine! Particularly, I seriously skimp on housework! There is mould on the bathroom wall but it’s above head level so no one has to look at it.

  If you could (or if you had to) start over again, what would you do differently?

I think I would pay more attention to fundamental mathematics. I know I passed exams and I know I passed them well but sometimes I wonder if I had because I forget things! I wouldn’t study second year physics, I would do statistics. I would be a bit more out there, do a bit more self-promotion in a nice way and make sure that research gets the time it needs. Other than that, I wouldn’t do things differently.

  And to finish, fortune cookie question! Is there a saying you see as your motto?

Don’t die wondering, just do it! I think mottos change as you progress but at the moment, this one really sums up what is important for me. Don’t die wondering, give it a go and if it doesn’t work, then fine. What’s the worst that can happen?

This interview has been performed as part of a project with the ANU Gender Institute.

[remarkablewomeninscience]

"Self-confidence can grow from kindness and from the recognition we get as we go along."

Dr Jenny Stauber works at CSIRO where she studies aquatic ecotoxicology. She also serves as an expert eco-toxicologist on science advisory boards, both nationally and internationally.

  First, can you tell me a little about you? For example, how did you become interested in science?

My father was an industrial chemist so, as kids, we grew up with this chemistry, science background. We had fun playing with chemistry kits and microscopes. But the other thing that really played a role for me is that when I started high school (this was when we started science, real science in those days). I had a fabulous Year 7 teacher. She was actually an English teacher who was also teaching science. I still remember her telling us about molecules, gases, liquids and solids during our very first lesson. This was enough to spark my interest in science.

In years 11 and 12 of high school I took advanced (Level 1) multi strand science - biology, chemistry and physics. I couldn’t quite decide whether I wanted to do pharmacy or a straight science degree. I was very lucky to get a job at the Roche Research Institute of Marine Pharmacology (RRIMP) in Sydney for the school holiday period at the end of year 12. Decision made! I worked there for two months initially and was fortunate to be able to carry on working there for 2 months every Christmas holidays throughout my Science Degree at Sydney University. I worked in both their marine pharmacology and microbiology sections. I was earning very little money (about $80 per week – much less than I could earn in a factory or retail holiday job). That experience made me realise that, while I had an interest in pharmacology, I decided I would rather do a science degree. I thought that after doing pharmacy, working in a chemist shop, could be boring. I enrolled at Sydney University and unfortunately, pharmacology clashed with microbiology in second year’s timetable, so I ended up doing a double major in biochemistry and microbiology instead. Certainly having that lab experience in a research institute at the end of Year 12 helped me decide on what aspect of science to focus.

  What has been your career path? What drives you and makes you enjoy your current work position? What keeps you motivated when everything seems to fall apart?

The summer job at RRIMP over those four years actually got me a job in CSIRO... I got a permission to do an Honours year outside of university (which was really hard to get at that time), to study microbiology at RRIMP. I was just about to start Honours when a job opportunity came up at CSIRO. They were recruiting an experimental scientist for their marine biochemistry lab at the then CSIRO Division of Fisheries and Oceanography. I applied for it, along with about 140 people at the time. The reason I got the job was because I had this eight-month’ experience and also because my boss at RRIMP, who knew the person hiring very well, was able to ‘champion’ me. I didn’t do my Honours year but it wasn’t so much a hard decision at that stage. I had been at uni for three years and I wanted to get out, earn a bit of money and be independent. I was only doing Honours to try to get a job at CSIRO anyway. Actually, even though I didn’t do the Honours year, I was able to do a Masters Preliminary, which was like a year you did before you went on to do a Master of Science and a PhD. So it didn’t really matter in the end. Although, I missed out on a great project which included learning to scuba dive!

When I started at CSIRO, I was at the bottom level; I was just an experimental scientist, straight out of uni. I did this Masters preliminary part-time while working. I then did a Master of Science degree in biochemistry on micro-algae and pigments, while still working for CSIRO. When our Division moved to Hobart, I was fortunate to get a position with CSIRO Energy Chemistry, still in our local area Sutherland Shire. Working with Dr Mark Florence I was fortunate to be able to have many opportunities to publish research in the field of environmental chemistry and ecotoxicology, focusing on the speciation, bioavailability and toxicity of contaminants in aquatic and marine systems. I was then translated across to the research scientist functional area. I ended up doing a PhD and I didn’t have to leave CSIRO to do it. In actual fact, it was fairly easy. I had been working with the University of Tasmania on different projects and they allowed me to do a PhD externally with them. All I had to do was a PhD by publication, I was able to pull together all my publications and write my thesis around them. It was a very easy way to get a PhD, I thought, compared to all the PhD students I have since supervised. I really recommend it!

My husband got a job in 2005 in Hong Kong and I was very lucky again: CSIRO accepted that I moved to Hong Kong to do my job while still being part of the organisation. I had a research group at that stage and I would travel back to Sydney at my own expense nearly every month over a three year period. Again, CSIRO was really good to me. During this time in Hong Kong, I was very fortunate to get a visiting professorship at City University of Hong-Kong. I lectured there, three hours a week on Friday nights to part time Masters Students. That was a tough gig as there were no text books or specific course requirements so I had to make up the lectures from scratch. But it did get me connected with the academic community there. I have kept contact with several colleagues at universities in Hong Kong and China. We still collaborate on a range of projects even now.. And I still have a “soft spot” for Hong Kong and visit there regularly.

In 2008, I was asked to take up the role of Deputy Chief of the Land and Water Division. I came back to Australia to take up this role. I was Deputy-Chief for 4 years and then Acting Chief for almost one year, before returning to the Deputy Chief role until July this year. CSIRO had a big restructure this year and I have stepped out of research management and gone “back to the bench”, back to my substantive Chief Research Scientist role.

As a Deputy Chief, I had oversight of 3 research programs, as well as support functions -HR, Health and Safety, and Communications, in addition to an external role. With about 500 staff and affiliates, there were many complex interpersonal issues, exacerbated by high workloads, complex processes and insufficient resources in CSIRO. Managing these was quite stressful, especially as they were entirely confidential: there was no sounding board.

I had done a number of leadership courses through CSIRO, together with a Company Director’s course. These courses give you the legal and financial context but you learn more about people handling skills on the job. You have to learn what works and what doesn’t through trial and error.

I am very glad that I did the Deputy Chief and Acting Chief roles. When CSIRO restructured, divisions were abolished as were those roles, so I stepped out of research management/ leadership. There are some aspects that I don’t miss. It was very full-on, very stressful; I worked up to 70 hours a week for a long time. Now I do miss “being in the know” to some extent i.e. knowing what’s going on in the organisation. It was hard to let go of this ‘authority’ that comes with leadership roles. Now it’s more about influence and keeping connected to the network I have established over the 35 years I have been with CSIRO.

I don’t actually do research at the bench myself; it’s all done through students and the research group. I am not back in the lab at all. I spend about 60 to 70% of my time now on science advisory boards, nationally and internationally. I work for both the Commonwealth and the State Governments, giving advice about issues as diverse as coal seam gas, water and sediment quality guidelines, ecotoxicology; acid sulphate soils, hazardous waste, uranium mining and chemicals risk assessment. It gives me many opportunities to travel, to provide advice in my area of expertise and to learn about things much broader than my own expertise. I love that kind of committee role. It’s getting the science back into the applied and policy world, whether it’s for the community, government, industry, or a regulator. It’s very rewarding, and it’s a very different role I have now than when I started my career.

I never had a problem with being female while I was Deputy Chief. I was never not respected because I was female, possibly because I had had the chance to build up my research credentials and international reputation as a research scientist, before stepping in to a research management role. I think those kinds of positions have a certain kind of built-in authority; people respect you whether you’re male or female. A lot of the authority comes with the position rather than the person. I didn’t find being female a problem at all.

If you are not politically savvy, it is sometimes hard to move in these circles. I am fairly straightforward as a person. I am not into playing games or manipulating people and I like to be liked! That’s probably not the best way to be in these kinds of positions. Some people are much better than me at positioning themselves to move up the organisation. I think (perhaps naively) that promotion is based on merit more than manoeuvre. But in reality, you probably have to be a little bit more manipulative than that to really break through the glass ceiling as a female.

I also don’t like confrontation and tension, as it is so unproductive so I will always opt for early intervention before things escalate. For me, the best approach is a direct approach. If someone is manoeuvring or destabilising things, affecting or undermining other people, my approach has always been to pull them aside privately and have a chat about what they are doing and why, and make them realize that what they are doing has an impact on others. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but I always try to use this approach and, to understand their point of view.

  What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues?

I was Acting Chief for the Division for nearly a year before someone overseas (external to CSIRO) was appointed for the role. I did apply for the position but was unsuccessful despite being financially rewarded for doing great job! That was a bit tough for me to accept, but I put personal feeling aside and did my best to help the new person into the role.

The next challenge was the CSIRO restructure this year, and the loss of my formal leadership role. Perhaps that has been the most difficult time for me – feeling unvalued by the organisation. Getting to a particular point in your career and then not getting to that next step was hard. But I was fortunate because I had the science to fall back on. I had always had students all through the time I was Deputy Chief. I kept both the science and advisory board things going so I could go back to that quite easily, unlike some other leaders who opted for redundancy.

 I am a very resilient person and I believe it’s important to get on with life, especially after disappointments. You have two choices: you either accept it and cope or you leave the organisation. Some of my close colleagues did leave and now have good jobs at universities. Other people stayed on and had to accept that they would move back to a lower level on lower pay.

Female leaders didn’t fare well in the restructure at all. Before the restructure, we had three female Chiefs and a couple of Flagship directors. Of the 9 flagships in CSIRO now, none have female Directors. It was disappointing as we had worked hard in my Division to develop a pipeline of female leaders and give them the skills to step up, and yet none were successful, despite Diversity and Inclusion policies across CSIRO. The important thing now is to stay positive and try to effect change for the younger cohort of females coming through.

I have actually benefited from being female: I have had opportunities to be on advisory boards or panels because there might have been nine men there and no woman. These opportunities have then led on to others, through building networks. Perhaps we have opportunities that we would otherwise not have had. And it’s better to be in it than not in it!

  As a Deputy Chief, you set up a network for women in science at CSIRO. How did it start and what are the main initiatives that have been taken as part of this network?

Before I became Deputy Chief, I had a very strong female cohort in my own research group. We were more than 50% female, which was quite unusual in the organisation but I thought it was normal. Then, as I took on this new role, I realized that we were the exception, that there were few women research scientists in the Division. I thought that, as the only female Deputy Chief in the Division, it was my role to try and address gender imbalance. So I became much more interested in that from 2008 onwards.

Fortunately our Chief at the time was very supportive of improving diversity. We set up a network for women in science, which started in our division and then spread out to four major CSIRO sites. We had very active groups in Canberra and Adelaide, and smaller groups in Perth and Melbourne.

We organised and funded a series of leadership workshops for women around the country over three years, facilitated by two marvellous women Maggie Leavitt and Jen de Vries from WA. Sixty women within the organisation went to these workshops. It included how to make sure we can get the most out of the opportunities we are given or to create opportunities for ourselves, as well the importance of networks, small wins and mentoring. With HR, we set up a mentoring scheme in the division, including formal mentoring agreements. I had also done a workshop with another Division on unconscious bias and that was quite useful so we planned to role that out across the Division. I also got involved in the CSIRO-wide reference panel to help HR develop a CSIRO diversity and inclusion plan. Last year, I wrote a diversity and inclusion action plan for our Division. We thought we needed to do things with women and men in the same groups so we were developing that as well. This needs to be revisited since the restructure and I’ll probably help on a Flagship diversity and inclusion committee that has just been re-established.

I think these initiatives helped to support individual women and to equip them with leadership skills, but the restructure revealed that it hasn’t yet changed things at an organisational level.

  What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of?

It’s hard to pick out one thing because there are many different levels. When you start your career, you get immense satisfaction from your own achievements such as the first published journal paper or first project leader role. Later in your career, it’s all about helping other people reach their maximum potential. I get more excited now about achievements of my group: students getting their PhD, people having a successful career after working here for a while. Watching students blossoming into successful research scientists is something absolutely fantastic. For example, a student in my group won the best oral Conference Paper presented at an international conference not long ago. It was great!

Personally one of my proudest achievements was when we won a Eureka Award in 2006 (they are the Grammys for science in Australia). It’s a nice acknowledgment for the work we did on sediments. I don’t think we realized at that stage what a big deal it was in terms of media coverage. There are very few awards like that in science, so it probably happens only once in your life.

  Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor?

When Fisheries and Oceanography Division (where I started) moved to Hobart, I stayed in Sydney, moving divisions. My boss in this new division was a wonderful mentor. I kept in touch with him even after he retired in the early 1990s. He was like a second father to me. Learning from him, I have tried to emulate positive feedback. I really like to give people good feedback when they have done something well. Positive feedback is so powerful: sometimes, just a few nice words can make a big difference in terms of self-confidence. It’s also important to give people constructive feedback if they have done something wrong. You can say that in a nice way and help them do better but if they have done something right, let them know how good they are!

I think you can talk to people about their behaviour, their strengths and weaknesses in an honest but non-confronting way. You can get your message across without making it sound discouraging. Women in general do well in leadership because I think we tend to be quite empathetic, which is very important. In general, people appreciate honest feedback delivered in the right way.

I actively mentor many staff, not just in my research group but beyond. One of the reasons that kept me at CSIRO during this change period is that I really enjoy working with the people here at Lucas Heights. It’s a really happy site and we try to keep what makes it special. There is no hierarchy here and mentoring is a big part of our success.

We try to encourage students to find their way. It’s not a matter of changing their careers’ direction; it’s more about giving them opportunities. You can work out fairly quickly students’ strengths and weaknesses. For example, if they are good communicators, we give them chances to go to conferences very early on. We rehearse them within the group before they give their first talk at a conference so they will have a couple of practices in a kind environment. We actively encourage them to nominate for awards e.g. Fresh Science.

  What has been the most important advice you were ever given?

Treat people the way you would like to be treated. That’s probably from my mother. The other thing, from family as well, is that achievement comes through hard work: don’t expect to get something for nothing. I learned early on that you have to make things happen through your own hard work. You are in charge of your own destiny, I suppose. You need to be able to move on, not to get bitter and twisted. Move on; be in charge of your own happiness.

  What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists?

You have to be in it to win it! Don’t be afraid to put yourself forward for opportunities. I think women in particular need to be more proactive, to look for opportunities. Self-promotion is something you need to learn. Not to the extent of being a pain but there is an in-between. If an opportunity comes, you grab it with both hands, even though you might be out of your comfort zone taking this on. This is not the time to worry about what you cannot do!

I believe a lot in volunteerism. I believe young female scientists should volunteer through professional societies for positions like President, Treasurer, etc. You meet lots of people through these professional networks and they are incredibly important throughout your career.

Don’t get into research management too soon. You have to build your research reputation in a particular field first and then you can step into research management. By doing so, you can step out again if necessary. You need to build a network around your technical expertise. It’s important if you want to stay in research.

  Self-confidence is not always easy to build. How have you dealt with confidence issues? Do you have tips/tricks that helped you with establishing yourself as a leader in your field?

I am a self-confident and competitive person by nature so it’s never been an issue for me. I am also an extravert and enjoy performing to an audience, though am mellowing a bit now. I think that has probably helped me.

Self-confidence is built through your peer network. It’s really great to work with others when you start your career. I try to be nice to people, and to earn trust and respect. Self-confidence can grow from kindness and from the recognition we get as we go along. I guess it’s obviously easier if you are a self-confident person in the beginning: you can bounce back when your confidence gets a bit low. Having a good mentor helps as well, someone who knows you and can help you with networking. In my case, I had a wonderful mentor during my career and it was a huge part of building my self-confidence because I was given opportunities early on to do my own research, publish papers and travel to conferences. Not everyone gets these opportunities but they help to build your research reputation and your confidence.

  Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you?

It’s always difficult for a couple when you both have your own careers. A lot of people face this. We were unable to have children so it was relatively easy for me to focus on career.

Compromise is always necessary. It’s all about making choices and being mindful of your partner’s career and needs too. It doesn’t work for everybody but it certainly worked for us. I sacrificed a research management role when I moved to Hong Kong: I wasn’t able to take up the program leader’s position that was offered to me. My husband then sacrificed his highly paid job in Hong-Kong for a multi-national company to come back to Australia to be with me when I took up the Deputy Chief role for CSIRO. In the end, we have been very lucky it has worked out well for both of us.

It’s important to have support. My husband shares a lot of the household duties. That’s a big part, especially as a woman. It took him a while to negotiate to come back from Hong-Kong so we could be together. He then got a redundancy about a year later. So he was at home for maybe eight months while I was Acting Chief for the Division, which was fantastic for me: dinner would be cooked when I got home at 8pm… that was lovely! He then went back to Hong Kong for a year when I resumed the Deputy Chief role in 2013.

It was not a good work/life balance when I was Deputy Chief. What I did (and still do) is that I had some escapes. I used to teach ballet every Saturday. Now, it’s probably once a month. It forced me to do something completely different and to not work all weekend. I am not as self-disciplined as I should be so I have to make sure I have exercise activities organised. For example, I love to do Pilates so I go to two Pilates classes a week, one of them is on Saturday but the other one is on Thursday, 5:30pm. So I have to leave work at 5pm at least one day per week!

  If you could (or if you had to) start over again, what would you do differently?

I would have loved to have been good enough to be a professional ballerina!

If I had to leave CSIRO, I would probably go to a university. What would I do differently? Perhaps the only thing I would do differently is that earlier on in my career, I would be a bit more assertive. I had a very demanding first boss in CSIRO. I think I have been very fortunate. It’s a bit serendipitous, things fall into place. You don’t always have control over the way things pan out.

  And to finish, fortune cookie question! What’s the funniest/craziest thing that ever happened to you in the lab/field?

I haven’t done as much field work as I would have liked to but we had fantastic trips to Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Chile, Bulgaria on the Black Sea in the middle of nowhere… all sorts of weird and wonderful places. We wandered through swamps with crocodiles, went on overloaded helicopters... We probably wouldn’t do that nowadays. It was a bit different twenty years ago.

One of the funniest things happened to me while I was on a field trip and on my first visit to Papua New Guinea. I was doing work up there in various small villages, downstream from a large mine. I think I was the only female in the mining town. I arrived late in the evening by myself. I finally found where I was supposed to stay (in the dongas), got the key, opened the bedroom door, and switched on the light. Sleeping in my bed was a PNG national who woke up startled to see a fair-haired, young white woman in the room! I don’t who was the more shocked… Anyway that’s my Goldilocks story which had a satisfactory end – I checked myself into the only hotel in town and charged its exorbitant room rate back to the mining company!

[remarkablewomeninscience]

The end of the year is almost here... So I guess it's time to have a quick look at what this (half) year has been for the League!

The last few months have been an incredible adventure. Hearing and sharing these remarkable journeys is such an inspiring experience! Thank you so much for being part of this. And stay tuned, there are many more interviews to come in 2015...

[remarkablewomeninscience]

Women in STEM, from a historical perspective... This panel discussion is fascinating!

via Lady Scientists of Tumblr

[remarkablewomeninscience]

#girlscanbe

http://girlscanbe.tumblr.com/

[remarkablewomeninscience]

"We all have times when we wonder if we can do this or that. It's part of the journey"

Dr Rachel Burton works at the University of Adelaide, where she studies plant cell wall synthesis, remodeling and degradation.

First, can you tell me a little about you? For example, how did you become interested in science?

Geography was the thing I was very good at, the thing I really loved. But there were no jobs in geography, apart from teaching. Biology was a close second so I ended up doing biology. I was told that I would do a degree and then a PhD and probably end up in research. I kind of took that for granted, really!

In the UK, you take A-levels before you go to uni. I didn’t do so well in one of these A-levels so I ended up not going to the university I thought I would go to. I went through this system called clearing where they basically looked at what places they had left and offered you one. The university I ended up at was far in the north of Scotland. They offered me a place there. The courses looked OK but they told me that I wouldn’t start until the next year. Almost on the spot, I decided I was going to have a year out, which I hadn’t really planned. I thought about what I could do with that year, I wrote a heap of letters to science companies and labs. One of the letters was to Rothamsted Experimental Station. A week later, I got a letter back from Rothamsted and got offered a job as a technical officer in a lab working on Rhizobium. I was 18, suddenly I had a job, I was earning money (and the wage was pretty good), I was surrounded by scientists, which was fascinating! I was doing stuff I absolutely loved! I didn’t know any of it so Penny Hirsch did a really good job of teaching me everything. I had the most amazing year out. I am sure it changed my life.

That year out was where I was exposed to research, to scientists. At that point, I decided that it was what I would do. My daughter is 15 and she is very worried that she doesn’t know what she would like to do. I keep telling her that it doesn’t really matter. These days, you can change careers more easily. I say to both my children that all I want for them is to do something that they love. I don’t care what it is: if they want to bake cakes, go coal mining, sing, as long as they love what they are doing.

In South Australia, in Year10, they are supposed to write a personal plan about what they want to do, where they are going. What they get in terms of career advice depends on that and I think that’s crazy! You don’t really know what you want to do, who you want to be when you are 15 or 16, at least most people don’t. I knew what I wanted to do but, even then, I made quite a few really big stuff-ups.

  What has been your career path? What drives you and makes you enjoy your current work position? What keeps you motivated when everything seems to fall apart?

After my year out, I went to Aberdeen to study biology. It was a bit of a shock. I had to do fairly general subjects. I studied botany, zoology, geography, chemistry. It was very frustrating and I felt really unhappy because I had gone from the best year of my life to the worst.

I decided I would move universities. I got told I couldn’t do that but I contacted the previous Head of the Microbiology Department at Rothamsted. He was moving to Bristol University to become Head of Plant Science there. I told him I was very unhappy and he got me a place at Bristol for which I am very grateful When I got there I was standing in the line to register for the botany degree and I suddenly thought that I should do microbiology instead because that was what I had done at Rothamsted. But it was very silly: the only microbiology class was medical microbiology. So I ended up doing my degree in a field that was completely the wrong thing!

I finally got back on track working in plants after my degree. I was able to take a few more courses during my third year and I studied a lot of plant science, which helped me. Being able to go back on track like that is the reason why I always say that nothing is irreversible.

At the end of my Honours degree, just before my PhD, I did what was called a ‘British-Australian vocational exchange”. I was in Sydney, working in a company that doesn’t exist anymore. I had the most fantastic time for three and a half months. I loved Sydney and I thought I would love to go back to Australia. I actually was offered a PhD at CSIRO in Canberra but I had already accepted one at the John Innes Institute. So I ended up doing my PhD in England. Working at the John Innes was amazing, especially in terms of methods. I learnt a lot there!

After two years or so of postdoc, I came back to Australia because one of the guys I had shared a house with while in Sydney was getting married. I visited friends in Adelaide and I decided I would just check if there were any jobs going. I asked my friends who I should go and talk to. They gave me a list of names and Geoff Fincher was one of the names. He had come to the John Innes for a sabbatical a few years earlier. When I walked into the office, he said “Oh! You are not who I thought you were!”. We sat down, had a chat and he offered me a job on the spot. Not too bad again! He had a four year position, he had interviewed twice and he hadn’t been able to appoint anyone so he had been given permission to appoint by invitation. And he offered me the job. It just dropped straight in my lap!

He asked me if I could start in April (it was in February) and I said no! We eventually settled on June and I came back to Australia for what I thought would be a four year postdoc. And, basically, I have been in the same lab ever since. It was 19 years ago.

I am on soft money, which is a bit scary. But that’s OK. I have been very fortunate because, even if I am on soft money, even if I haven’t had the security of a tenured position, research is the thing I have really focused on, which I love. I also have a lot of students I supervise and I teach masters courses. I feel like I have the perfect balance. I love getting in the lab. It doesn’t happen very often now but I love it. A lot of the things I set up as a post-doc are still used in the lab and it gives me a kick to see that, it’s nice! Now the students are kind of my hands and I love it when we get together and they tell me about what they have done, the results they have. They are excited, it’s wonderful. I love seeing students growing up and getting so excited about their science. I love helping them get the most out of what they are doing.

I am now the director of the Plant Accelerator, which means I meet a lot more people. I have always loved the outreach. That’s always great fun!

What are, for you, the main initiatives that need to be taken to improve gender equity?

There were four senior women in the institute I worked in when I was a student. My supervisor, and two other ladies, who didn’t have children and worked something like 80, 90 hours a week; and the last one had kids but, as she and her husband had very good salaries, they employed a full time nanny. So there were these four women, three of them with no children and the other essentially able to pay for really top quality childcare. When I look at what is around me now, I think women go more for both career and a family. I think this has changed, people decide that they are going to have both. It’s very tough still. I think things have changed a little bit but I reckon it’s going to change more in the next few years. I reckon the time is right: we are going to see a real shift.

At the University of Adelaide, the Faculty of Science has set up a Gender, Equity and Diversity Committee. I am on board. We recently organized a forum, we talked about best practices, about unconscious bias and we also had talks from Indigenous people: cultural diversity is as important as gender balance. This forum is one of the first things that have happened in the university but I am hoping there will be much more. There has been a lot of interest and I feel the ripples will spread from there. Someone said that when you get the older men at university to talk about these things, this is when things start to move. That’s what we did. We will keep pushing it and I am very hopeful it will work. We might start getting somewhere.

There are two things I see as very important: first, having technical support while you are at home with a baby so your science can keep going would be absolutely vital. And second, being able to offer a bridging system if there is a gap in a grant, for people on soft money. You wouldn’t need to do that for everybody: it could be done on merit, that’s fine. You lose a lot of talent because they are not at the right place at the right time or there is not enough support. I think if you put these two things in place (and you have to make it equally available for men and women), I suspect it could make a big difference.

  What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues?

I am not sure I have felt discriminated against.

The biggest problem I have had was being a woman with children and trying to keep my career going. You get so tired, you don’t have enough time, and you are always running. For me, juggling all these things was really tough.

Going back full time when my daughter was six month old is something I shouldn’t have done. It was easier when my son was born. I stayed at home for five months but I felt so much more relaxed: you know what you are doing when it’s your second child. I went back to work part time at the beginning. I worked 80%, then 90% and then full time again. I was working full time no matter what anyway.

There is something important here: if you know that you are going to work 50 hours a week, just say it! If you work at home and you produce ten papers a year, clearly you are working hard! We don’t get paid for everything we do but you should at least get full time pay if you are full time, even if you are not physically at work full time. It’s not just about women; it’s about men as well. It could make a big difference for everyone!

There are many things that could be done about that: we could make part-time more acceptable for men and women, we could make job sharing much more easily accessible. We could make working at home or flexible hours easier, we could be more aware of meeting times. Doing all these small things would already make a massive difference.

  What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of?

I am very proud that I have come out with two gorgeous, balanced kids and a career. I have managed it, I have done it!

  Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor?

One of my major influences has been my boss, Geoff Fincher. He is a very driven, successful scientist, very understanding about families and flexibility. He is very good at getting money; he taught me how to write grants, he taught me how to maintain relationships with industries, etc. I am so grateful of all I learned from him.

You need different people for different things. You need sponsors, people who will put your name forward for things. And you can have anti-mentors as well as mentors: being a good scientist doesn’t always mean you will be a good manager! You choose what you want to learn from whom.

I have been lucky enough to participate in coaching sessions. It has made a huge difference to the way I view myself and my abilities, to the way I interact with people. I think I am lucky that the way I interact with people is that I am accessible, approachable. That has been brought out by the coaching; you are made aware of what you are actually doing. You do it automatically and suddenly someone makes you wonder why and how. I didn’t realize before I had this coaching but I am the one setting the culture, it’s very clear. As a supervisor, you are basically the one setting the example. We are incredibly sociable in my lab, we talk to each other, we celebrate everything, we have cake and champagne for papers. It’s a very important part of our lab’s culture. I feel like I have done a good job!

I try to do as much as possible for my staff. I always try to push my people to do things. We do a massive amount of outreach for the size of the lab we are. I have been pushing people to do that, I am teaching them about networking. Some of them are very talented at it, they should be on television!

Many of my female staff are part time and now, I have two members of male staff who are also part time. It is still very uncommon but it’s great: it shows that it has to be offered to everybody. I also try to help people struggling with impostor syndrome, making them realize they are good enough. We all feel the same: we all have times when we wonder if we can do this or that. It’s normal. It’s part of the journey. A lot of people come to me for advice. One of the things I am good at is looking after my students personally and professionally. You cannot separate the two things. I use either my own experiences or other people’s experiences to try and help them. I think that’s important and healthy to share experiences. People around you are one of the best resources you can have.

  What has been the most important advice you were ever given?

I don’t think there was a single piece of defining advice that was given to me.

  What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists?

If you are trying to make a decision, just realize that nothing is irreversible (apart from having children). If you do something and make a mistake, you can undo it. Don’t be scared of trying. It’s better to choose and deal with this choice than to sit there and agonize trying to weigh up the different options you have.

And also, do what you love! It makes happy people and happy people live good lives.

  Self-confidence is not always easy to build. How have you dealt with confidence issues? Do you have tips/tricks that helped you with establishing yourself as a leader in your field?

I am much better at self-confidence than I was before. Coaching made a big difference to fix that. I love presenting; I have always been good at that so it’s not a drama. For me, it’s more about abilities and whether or not I am worth it. It’s going back to the impostor syndrome.

Coaching helped me realize that I was doing good things and that I should be proud of these things. You need a certain amount of self-confidence but you don’t need a massive ego to succeed. I see so many egos, they just override everything. You do much better if people around you are happy, if you give them a hand: the better everybody else does, the better you do. That’s the way I want to work. I trust my judgement, my own intuition. It’s self-confidence, really. Now, I can make decisions without agonizing over them.

I don’t really worry about things because it’s a waste of energy. You might feel a bit uncomfortable about doing something but it’s OK, that’s fine, you can do it anyway! I guess you need to take risks from time to time. Very often, you push yourself out of your comfort zone and everything goes fine. I tell my students not to try and second-guess life, just to get on with it! As John Lennon said, life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.

  Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you?

It’s a lot easier now that kids are older.

I don’t think there is really a recipe for it. You just do it! You get help if you need it. My kids were in childcare right from six months old four days a week. The fifth day, it would either be my mother-in-law or my husband (he decided to go 80% so he would have a day with the kids until they went to school. He loved that and I think the kids loved that too). Good quality childcare onsite made a massive difference: I could keep breastfeeding the first year.

Flexibility is very important as well. Now that my husband and I have separated we have 50/50 shared care, on a week on/week off basis. When I have the kids, I do a short week in terms of being physically in the lab. But when they do their homework, I do my homework too! So I still do a full day’s work even if it is split in different parts and places. The week I don’t have them, I do longer hours but I don’t work when I go home. That works really well. Everybody knows that I am on short/long weeks and it works fine. If someone needs to see me on a short week, then it will have to be before 3pm. It’s the same with people working part time: we know which days they are in or not. It’s all about flexibility and communication. It’s a nice culture to have, nobody abuses it. You could tell if it was the case. A lot of our projects are team projects so if someone is not putting the effort in, it’s easy to work it out.

  If you could (or if you had to) start over again, what would you do differently?

If I had to start over, I don’t think I would do anything differently. I don’t regret anything. Maybe I would not have studied medical microbiology, maybe I would have stayed in that queue and gone to botany instead but my life would have been different and I may not have moved to Australia. Who knows? I am perfectly happy with what happened to me. There is value in every step of my journey. I had the most wonderful time.

If I couldn’t work in science, I don’t know what I would do! Teaching might be an option, but I would have to teach science. So that’s cheating, isn’t it? There would be some sort of science no matter what. I think I could be a good coach, which is teaching, actually… That would be incredibly satisfying as well.

  And to finish, fortune cookie question! Is there a saying you see as your motto?

My mother and I have a saying: ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. I say it very often to my kids, I have explained it to them and now they understand. To get on with things instead of procrastinate is a good philosophy to have. Procrastination is always something you have to be careful about!

[remarkablewomeninscience]

Last week, the League was in Sydney for five interviews at the University of Sydney, the University of Technology, Sydney, Macquarie University and CSIRO. This was part of the grant awarded by the ANU Gender Institute and it was awesome! Interviews will be published very soon. Stay tuned!

Because of the o! so classic ‘too many things to do/not enough time’ combo, interviews may be published fortnightly for a few weeks. Everything will go back to normal weekly publication as soon as there is a little bit more time!

In the meantime, have a look to the ‘What I See’ Project, a great video interview project featuring women from all ages, countries and walks of life. Some of them are scientists and they share inspiring stories and advice.

[remarkablewomeninscience]

"Look at options and opportunities beyond your own area!"

Dr Kathryn Tonissen works at Griffith University where she studies the function of the thioredoxin system in cancer cell development, progression and metastasis.

First, can you tell me a little about you? For example, how did you become interested in science?

I think I always did like science; I always liked learning about things. I think I had different interests on the way. Most of my relatives lived on a farm, I always really enjoyed going on the farm, riding horses. It was a sheep farm so I learned about the sheep and I guess I became interested in all sorts of animals. Because of that, I had an interest in biology from an early age.

I first wanted to become a vet. Then I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist, etc. I didn’t exactly know what I wanted to do but I knew I liked biology, I knew I liked science so I went to the University of Adelaide (I grew up in Elizabeth, which is a satellite city of Adelaide) to do a general Bachelor of Science degree, where I studied biology, maths, chemistry, etc. I think my really big hit on molecular biology was because of some really superb lectures we had during the first semester, this is how I realized that was what I wanted to do. At the time, the degree I did was pretty unusual because I studied molecular biology, computing science, biochemistry and microbiology. I narrowed it down as I went along.

  What has been your career path? What drives you and makes you enjoy your current work position? What keeps you motivated when everything seems to fall apart?

I decided I wanted to do Honours so I went on and did that but I didn’t think I would go on any further than that. But then, at the end of my Honours degree, my lab mates told me I should really do a PhD. I came top of the Honours year so I guess I realized that maybe I was better at this than what I thought I was! It kept falling along at each little stage.

After my PhD, I went to the University of Texas, at Austin for a post-doc. I changed fields at that time, I moved to a more developmental biology type of project, still using molecular techniques. My supervisor was someone who visited us in Adelaide so I did know him. I really liked Austin; I really liked the lab environment that they had there. I stayed there for three years and, as I wanted to stay a little bit longer, I moved for a year or so into a molecular genetics lab. Then I applied for a job back in Australia, at Griffith University and I have been there ever since!

I am now a deputy head of school so I have a lot of admin work and I also do a lot of teaching but I think what really keeps me going is the supervision of Honours and PhD students. I really like seeing the changes in them. When they come in, they can be very quiet and unsure, they may need you for a lot of support but after a while, they will walk into your office and go “This is what I got, this is what I am going to do and here is the manuscript!” or “I just found this paper and this is what I want to do”. At that stage, they have taken control of their project and they are really making something out of it. Seeing this transition from being dependent to independent is always very rewarding, I really like that, this interaction. When I get upset with all my admin stuff, I walk into the lab or into the students’ office and I asked them to tell me something new!

What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues?

My PhD project was collaborative, I was sent samples that were supposed to be proteins but weren’t. They had activity in their assays but it was quite clear it wasn’t the protein they thought it was. They kept giving me samples that weren’t good so I was trying to work with this protein that wasn’t there… In the middle of my PhD, I actually went on another project for a while. Then, another lab we were collaborating with had this protein sequenced and I could keep going and finish my PhD. My supervisor was very supportive, I guess he was feeling a bit guilty, even if this wasn’t his fault. He tried to really encourage me. It required a lot of perseverance to keep going. I guess I learned that sometimes, you can turn negative into positive. I learned very much to drill down and look through problems! I also learned not to look at a result as face value. You are better off finding another way to show that a result is truly what you think it is. I have had several examples: proteins not being proteins, antibodies not binding to what they were meant to… That has taught me you have to be careful!

I kind of felt like it was my fault: I was feeling bad that I couldn’t clone this gene!  But it turned out that it wasn’t possible with the material I had been given. I think I was with a very good group of people, they were really high achieving, and they would always push you but also be very supportive at the same time. It made a big difference! This is what I try to emphasize with my students, you have to be part of a team, you have to help each other, you have not to be accusatory. It’s really easy to ask a student “Where did you stuff up?” but it’s also very bad. Sometimes, they haven’t even stuffed up anything, maybe a reagent has gone bad, etc.

I haven’t felt discriminated as a woman. I have been fortunate I have never faced discrimination per se. All my male supervisors have been really good, very supportive, probably because they had been very successful. I worked with people who were very good at sharing knowledge and experience. In fact, the worst boss I had was a woman. Women can sometimes fall into that track, that sort of “I did it the hard way therefore why should I help you? Everyone should have to do it the way I did it!”.

But things are changing and they need to, if we are to get women into the senior positions. For example, in my school, we don’t have a single female professor; we have a few associate professors. It really takes women to encourage other women. It also needs to be understood that both men and women can be biased against women.

There is definitely an unconscious bias: women tend to get the jobs that are the least strategic but often harder work. Women will get to sort out issues with people or they will get some of the more nurturing roles, teaching roles, roles that will get things working or functional. These roles are absolutely necessary and you’re given them because people know you will do well but there are not very strategic. People won’t go “Wow, that’s impressive!”.  Women are deemed to be good at these roles so they tend to get them while, sometimes, it would be fun to do some more ambitious sorts of things, where maybe you’ll fail, maybe you won’t.

  What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of?

I am not sure I can actually list one! Most of my achievements have not been achieved alone. During my PhD, I relied on the team I was in to help me through. I won a teaching award a few years ago and even for this, you don’t do it by yourself, there are always people who help you, who are part of a team.

Having a team that is working well is something I am very much happy about. Whatever you do, would it be research, teaching or service, you do that as a team. And even in your private and family life. I have really incredibly supportive family, none of my parents had PhDs, my dad went to university but not my mum. Both would encourage all of us kids to go on and do whatever we wanted. They supported me financially but they also encouraged me a lot. Right from the very beginning, there is definitely a supportive environment through everything; it’s what you need to succeed.

  Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor?

I don’t think I have had official mentors but I have had people who have helped me along the way. My PhD supervisor was really good at encouraging me. I had a fairly tumultuous PhD, I kept getting supplied with material from some of our collaborators and it turned out it was all the wrong stuff. I remember seeing him on a Sunday afternoon in the lab, telling me that he really admired how I kept going, how I was still determined to continue and work through these problems. There was that bit of encouragement, it was really important. And it the end, it all worked out for the best.

I had people sort of helping through the bad times but also, I guess I have had people telling me that I should be on this or that committee, things I wouldn’t have thought of doing. I have had people pushing me when I needed to be and these little things have been important to my career progression. As women, quite often, we tend to go “I don’t have experience in doing that job therefore I won’t be able to do it” but you need to realize that most people learn while being on the job! When you face a problem, you find ways to adapt. And people will help you. Most people think that if they cannot do something on their own, then they shouldn’t do it but you are obviously not alone, there will be people whose interest is that you do well so they will try and help you.

I have an open door policy for my own students but also for junior staff as well. I try to learn from what helped me, from what people did for me. People go through this kind of learning curve: when you start in the lab as a Honours student, you are lost and you feel helpless so you rely on your supervisor, on post-docs and PhD students to help you. In my lab, I try to get PhD students to help out project students or Honours students so they can get this feeling that it’s a team effort. You have to be a team player, it’s essential. I would rather have a team player who needs a little bit of extra training than someone who may be very good but not willing to share anything. You cannot expect people, for example, to fill in tip boxes for you, everyone has to help!

I have probably been fortunate that most people in my lab have been very good team players. All my PhD students have been really good in that regard. And I feel Honours students tend to follow the example they are given. When I am aware there is a problem in the lab, I try to be more present in the lab and that sort of puts a little bit of pressure.

  What has been the most important advice you were ever given?

Find what you are interested in and pursue that. Because you are not going to keep a commitment to something you are not interested in. Find something you want to do, something you are passionate about, whether it’d be on a small scale or a large scale. I think it works for everything: you spend more time on something if you are interested in it. Every job has a non-fun aspect, you have to appreciate that but as long as there are other aspects you love, it makes things much better. What I enjoy very much is my research and my PhD students, it keeps me going when things around are not that much fun.

  What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists?

First, as said above, find what you love doing and pursue that.

My other piece of advice would be to be adaptable, to be flexible. You have to look at options and opportunities beyond your own area. Things move, you have to look at and try to apply your skills and techniques to others’ problems. It’s a good way to find how you can collaborate with people.

Fostering collaboration with senior people is essential. People tend to think that senior people won’t worry too much about younger people but senior scientists tend to be very good towards junior staff. You’d be surprised how many people would react positively if you went and told them which area of research is yours and what you would like to work on with them. Especially if you make this first move. Being proactive is a key!

  Self-confidence is not always easy to build. How have you dealt with confidence issues? Do you have tips/tricks that helped you with establishing yourself as a leader in your field?

I’m actually still terrified of doing new things. Certainly, when I was growing up, I was a very shy person. If anyone told me then that I would have to get up and give lectures in front of 150 students or so, I would have thought there was no way I could do that. What I have done at each stage is to work out what needed to be done to get through it.

I am a very goal-oriented, focused and organised person. For me, it’s about being organised. If I’m not organised, I’m terrified. I cannot wing a lecture, I actually have to organize my lecture before I go there. There are some I have been doing year after year and I am a little bit more confident about leaving them to the last moment. But even with these ones, I have to read through before I go in there, I need to check what I am going to say, what is the message I have to get across. For me, it is preparation that takes out the terrifying part of doing something I haven’t done before. After that, you gradually build your knowledge.

And it’s the same with any committee meeting. The first time I went to the human ethics committee, I had only a little experience with that so I made sure I read every paper before I went in there!

Preparation and organisation were probably the things that helped me, that got me out of trouble when I wasn’t feeling confident at all.

  Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you?

It comes and goes. What I have learned now is that I must take my holidays! That is the big thing I learned. Now, the university forces us to go on leave anyway but I really learned you have to take time off. I need a real holiday, not “coming to work” holidays. So I tend to arrange to go away somewhere at least once a year so I have to be away. This year, it was two weeks in Spain and last year was Vanuatu. Pick somewhere different, somewhere you can go and totally relax and unwind.

People tend to feel like they shouldn’t go on holiday because they are needed, they sometimes feel it’s bad to go on holiday and that you should work even if you are away, that you should go to meetings no matter what. But I think you need that chance to relax and get re-energized. Then by the end of it, you come back and feel much better instead of feeling like every week is the same. Pick something that will be enjoyable to you, bushwalking, for example. I try to do that on week-ends but I tend to get caught back into work. Every so often, I have week-ends where I don’t do any work, where I don’t read my emails, to have a complete disconnection to have a little bit more energy to focus on coming back to work. It’s not a waste of time! It’s actually very important.

What I do as well is that I activate an automatic answer to emails. I may check my emails no matter what, especially if I know there is something important coming but it already helps not to feel obliged to answer every single email right away. A couple of years ago, I took long service leave, we went to the Galapagos and Internet access was almost inexistent there. There was nothing I could really do about that so I had to relax, enjoying the beaches, snorkelling and bushwalking. It was absolutely beautiful.

  If you could (or if you had to) start over again, what would you do differently?

I am still very interested in what I do, I have seen some amazing things, I had the chance to work overseas. One thing is that, as a scientist, when you get your degree, it’s a ticket to go wherever you want to in the world. And it’s great!

I don’t like the continuous fighting for funds aspect of it but all the rest of it, I do like. I might have made a few different strategic decisions along the way. I mean, at the end of my PhD, I just wanted to go elsewhere, to see something else. I probably could have, strategically speaking, picked my post-doc in an area that would have made it easier for me to go back to Australia. My post-doc was in Xenopus, which was really hard to set up in Australia so it made things a bit harder.

I, in fact, have come back now to what I was doing as a PhD. I would probably think a little bit more ‘long term’ than what I did However as it turned out I am really passionate about what I did during my PhD, so I enjoy seeing how the field has grown, especially internationally, and being able to contribute to it.

  And to finish, fortune cookie question! What’s the craziest thing that ever happened to you in the lab/field?

I remember back during my PhD a day when something specific wasn’t working and it was really frustrating. I cannot remember what that was anymore but a PhD student from the next lab came out with a yellow cap tube, put it on the floor in front of me and told me “OK, this is how we do that in my lab. Jump on it!”. I thought it was a bit weird but he insisted and so I jumped on it. He then told me “You’re feeling a lot better now, aren’t you?” and… it was true! So after that, when something very frustrating happened or when an experiment hadn’t worked for people, I would come and give them a yellow cap tube to relieve their stress. Sometimes there were even ‘two tubes’ kind of stress relief! We kept that for very, very stressful or frustrating situations…

[remarkablewomeninscience]

"It is important to take risks, to fail once in a while and to remember that you can get up and do it again"

Dr Susan Buchanan is chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), National Institutes of Health. Her research interest focuses on the structure determination of integral membrane proteins using x-ray crystallography.

  First, can you tell me a little about you? For example, how did you become interested in science?

I don’t think I knew as a child that I would be a scientist. But I always liked science. My father is a scientist and my mother was an English teacher. I guess I liked both things but as I continued in science education at school, whenever I didn’t understand something, I would discuss that with my father. That gave me a very good ground basis for science principles. I felt comfortable with that and I enjoyed it.

Two of my favourite high school classes were chemistry and anatomy, where we had to dissect things. In college, I thought about majoring in chemistry but I was never sure. I struggled like many people do. Some things, like analytical and physical chemistry were easier but organic chemistry was very hard for me. But I kept going, I sort of made a deal with myself about that, saying “I will try this one class and if I cannot do it, then I will do something else”. And it’s pretty much the way I have been for my entire career. After I finished, I decided to go to graduate school, also not sure if I was good enough to be a graduate student in chemistry. I had the same idea: “if I am not good enough, I will just do something else”. That worked out quite well.

  What has been your career path? What drives you and makes you enjoy your current work position? What keeps you motivated when everything seems to fall apart?

I am a protein crystallographer working on membrane proteins. Only one percent of all solved protein structures are membrane proteins. I am in that little tiny group of people. My field is higher risk than what most people would take on. The science itself was a huge challenge at the beginning, but also fascinating for me. I knew I had the basic skill set to be able to have things to work but I didn’t know if everything would come together at the right time. I think sometimes you also have to rely a little bit on luck. My feeling is that you need to be extremely well-prepared and educated. There are always opportunities that will come up: if you are well-prepared, you can take advantage of them.

I had a very long education process. My PhD, which I did in Germany, took seven years. I did a post-doc in the UK for three years and then I spent four and a half years in the US for a second postdoc. After that, I took an instructor position in London, which would have led to an independent faculty position. But at that point, I applied for a position at the NIH. I was hired as a tenure-track professor at NIH in 2001, I got tenured in 2008.

My (then) partner and I thought that the best solution for both of us would be to have two careers as principal investigators. We both looked for jobs in the same areas or the same universities. It was difficult because we are both in what people consider as high risk fields. We often found that universities were happy to hire one person who was high risk but not two. The way we dealt with it was to persevere, to be quite patient. He lived in the UK while I lived in Dallas. We thought it would be only for a year or two when we started but it lasted for four and a half years. We were both willing to compromise, we both equally decided to support the other. It turned out every move was better for one or the other, it went back and forth and it was fine.

It was certainly very helpful for me, for my career. Even if you have a very supportive partner, it’s tough in science and you need to feel like you are flexible. This is important not to feel like you are trapped or not evolving anymore. I would like to see more women become more independent and confident that they are worthy of having someone else make sacrifices for their career.

I am now chair of my department. I think that for women in general, the higher you go, the more you are pushed to do administrative duties. In my Institute, there was not a single woman chair of a department. So it was obvious that, when there would be a space to fill, I would be the most appropriate person to ask. I didn’t even really want to do it but sometimes you have to. You need to see at least some women in these positions to be able to see yourself there. If you only ever see men in these positions, it’s really hard to imagine yourself there.

Being a scientist is sometimes challenging but it has been great for me, I have been able to do what I wanted to do and I am still very excited by everything I want to do. In theory, principal investigators at NIH can work in the lab and I have been doing so quite a lot until last year. My goal is still to go back to the bench. If I knew that I would never do any more bench work, I would be very sad. I am an experimentalist at heart.

What are the main initiatives taken at NIH to improve gender equity?

I was until recently the chair of the NIH Women Scientist Advisors, a group consisting of senior women investigators from all 27 NIH institutes. It’s a big job. We meet as a group to figure what women on campus need and how to address these needs, etc. We started a program called ‘Keep the thread’ which allows people who are on maternity/paternity/family leave (it’s offered for men as well as women) to return only part-time if they want to and retain their health insurance. In the US, it’s a huge deal! We figured out a way that they could work as little as 40% and still have full health insurance. That’s a good way to go through this transition back into science. We have a two year limit on participation in the program and the idea is that postdocs can extend their fellowship by one year if they take two years part-time.

I think it’s an example of the kind of flexibility we need to think about for women. I do not have children so I didn’t need to do that but I know that there are all sorts of issues that require flexibility. We need to think more outside the box if we don’t want to lose these highly qualified female scientists. We lose so many of them! Our statistics in the US are that 50% of our postdocs in biomedical sciences are women across the country. By the time you get to assistant professor level (the first independent position you will have) numbers drop to 30%. So 20% of these women are not even applying for these jobs. And then, if you go further, to full professor level, it’s no more than between 1% and 5%. We are focusing on the first step: if you retain more women at junior levels, then they can create a community that will drive that whole process. And in a few years’ time, you could start seeing a difference.

Another thing I did recently is to establish small discussion groups for junior faculty members at a similar stage of their careers. They get together once every so often for coffee and discuss things: how do you hire people? How do you figure out what your budget is supposed to be? How do you deal with collaborators who want authorships they shouldn’t get? You often think that you are the only one going through these problems and it is helpful to know that other people face similar issues. Everyone needs to realize that it’s normal to fail or struggle sometimes. The good thing is that the groups are not institute-specific: it’s more or less a group of friends you’d have coffee with once in a while.

Initially, we wanted to establish these groups mostly for women because women often have more issues with self-confidence. We opened this up to men as well and we have a similar number of men compared to women who decided they wanted to join these groups. What we have done then was to appoint senior women to mentor these groups. Each group has two senior women to mentor them.

  What have been the biggest struggles you have had to deal with on your journey? In particular, have you faced discrimination or felt disadvantaged? How have you dealt with these issues?

I was 40 when I got a tenure track position at NIH. It’s a long time not knowing what would happen next. And even with a tenure track position, there is no guarantee that you will get tenured. At the NIH, only about 60% of the people we hire do get tenured eventually. That was also very stressful for me. It was difficult to get feedback on how well I was doing during this tenure track process. If you lack self-confident anyway, it makes things even harder not to have any idea whether or not you are doing well enough.

I was 47 when I got tenured. Not knowing if I would be successful enough to stay was hard. I wish there had been a way for me to have that answer earlier, I would have been happier. Since being tenured, I am much calmer, more self-confident and my research has been so much better! All the high profile things we have done have been done after tenure because I felt like I could take more risks and focus on my research. It would be nice to find ways to shorten this whole career track.

What has helped me, I guess, is that I have always been fairly stubborn. When I was at the NIH on a tenure track position, I decided to go through the whole process, to keep going until I had the answer. If you feel like you are competitive, I think you owe to yourself to keep going, to find out. There are many women who don’t have this perseverance and I don’t know what to offer them to make that work. I feel like, if more women had sufficient self-confidence to know they’d find what they need to keep going, then we would have more women who stay in science.

  What is the (professional/personal) achievement you are the most proud of?

I am the proudest of the group that I have built. I never saw myself as a PI. In my opinion, it sort of happened and it’s nice to see that the group I work with is successful and happy, that I can train people who will go out to do really good things afterwards. That makes me very happy. I have been successful enough in what I do, some people would say very successful. I used to want to be the best at everything but this is no longer true for me. If we make some nice contribution, that’s terrific. I am competitive enough, I want my group to do well. It’s important in my field to be as competitive as I can but now, I want that more for my group than for myself.

I am very happy that I figured out how to be an investigator and am finally comfortable in this role.

  Have mentors played an important role in your career? Are you yourself acting as a mentor?

I was very fortunate to have really good doctoral and post-doctoral advisors. I clearly do have mentors still now. One of my most valuable mentors now is my boss, he is the scientific director of my institute and until recently he was also my department chair. He is an amazing scientist, an amazing administrator. I am very fortunate I took over from him: it made taking this new position a lot easier. I knew I had someone who could guide me through, someone I trust.

You need all sorts of people, people who are in higher positions than you but also peer-based mentoring. When I started at NIH, I joined a committee of tenure track scientists who were from all different institutes. Our goal was just to make the tenure track process the same among all 27 NIH institutes. I got to know all these interesting people, who were all in the same position as me. We mentored each other. In particular, together with another woman in my institute, we would discuss all these procedural questions you would ask yourself along the way. She and I established mentorship committees for every tenure track scientist in our institute, that’s one of the early things we did. Since that time, I have got to know a lot of very strong women on the campus. It has been so important for me.

As a supervisor, it’s important to figure out where people in your lab want to be and help them to get there. Sometimes, it’s just acting as a sounding board. For many people, the most important thing is to feel like that they can come and talk to you to discuss pros and cons. If you run a group, you decide at one point what kind of environment you want to foster. Some people think that you will get more out of people if it’s a very competitive environment. If people are put head to head on a project, they are not happy but they are working really hard… I just never wanted that. I like harmony. In my opinion, happy people are most productive. I think it’s also about personality. I am fairly social anyway and I like talking to people. It would be harder to run a lab if you were such an introvert that you wouldn’t want to interact with people. Often women are a bit more social and that’s a skill they can use at their advantage.

Of the women that I have mentored, there are a few who have independent careers in science and I know a good number of women who are now doing other things. For example, someone who was working for me before has just started a job in science consulting. She is not in the lab anymore but she will have a very influential position and that’s what she wants to do. There are so many reasons that women either do or do not continue in science. And it’s important that we understand these reasons. To some extent, every woman has a different solution to how to manage a family if she has one, a career, and a personal life. There are no wrong and right answers.

Physically, my door is always open. People do pop in whenever they want and if I can’t talk to them right then, I tell them to come back in five minutes and it’s fine. I try to be available to people.

  What has been the most important advice you were ever given?

My parents always told me, from the time I was very young, “You can be whatever you want to be. Figure out what it is you want to do and you can do that”. Having that kind of guidance early on made a huge difference for me. I never questioned whether science should be something a woman would do, for instance. That was never a question I needed to ask. My parents raised their four children (I am the eldest of the family) to become very independent, we figured we should never feel like we should rely on a partner, we supported ourselves.

  What is the best advice you could give to young female scientists?

Figure out how to gain the self-confidence you need to be in the position you’d like to be in. It’s hard but it’s essential. I think you have to develop a thick skin to some extent. You have to learn how to believe in yourself if you want to work in science. And you also need a good support network, socially, personally and at work. If you don’t try to do science in a vacuum, it’s much better, much powerful and it’s also much more fun!

  Self-confidence is not always easy to build. How have you dealt with confidence issues? Do you have tips/tricks that helped you with establishing yourself as a leader in your field?

I don’t know how I built up my self-confidence. I wish I knew so I could teach others, if it’s even possible to teach something like that. I honestly can’t tell. I went through a number of very difficult situations in science. I guess that going through these things and coming through on the other end in one piece helps. It makes you tougher. This sort of toughness is very important. It is important to take risks, to fail once in a while and to remember that you can get up and do it again (or do something different). Definitely, failure is part of this process.

I do stand up for myself. I don’t fight and scream at people but I wouldn’t be pushed down either, there is a balance. And I believe this has to do with self-confidence as well.

  Work/life balance is one of the big issues women face. How do you deal with this issue? Do you have any tips that helped you?

There are people who can work 24 hours a day but I am not one of them, I never was. I did work seven days a week when I was a graduate student and a postdoc. But at some point along the way, I decided I needed my evenings free. I want my week-ends free from work as much as possible. I have a lot of friends, I like to be outside, I like to run. I hiked Mount Kilimanjaro last year, it was great!

I learned meditation during my postdoc in the UK, at a difficult stage of my career. It’s a way to control your mind so you are not constantly upset by things you can’t necessarily control. These things are helpful too.

There is no easy answer, though. And I feel like things are getting harder in science with tighter budgets, resulting in fewer jobs. I have seen it in the way people are reviewing grants in the US, some of them become adversarial. They are not being kind to one another because they are so frustrated. It’s a hard time.

  If you could (or if you had to) start over again, what would you do differently?

When I went to Germany to study, I initially only had a fellowship to study for one year and I ended up staying there for my entire PhD. I had started my PhD at Princeton. The person I worked for wanted to learn how to crystallize membrane proteins, he wanted me to go learn that and then come back and teach people in the lab. I went to spend a year in Germany, where was one of the only two groups in the world doing membrane protein crystallisation. I loved what I was doing there so much that I stayed for another four years. My boss got a Nobel Prize for his work while I was there. It was very exciting! It was fascinating to be there at the beginning of a field, to see it from its inception to what it is now. That was a lot of fun! I was lucky that I found what I loved doing, this sort of niche that I really enjoy.

My fellowship allowed me to learn German full time for two months when I started. I didn’t speak any German when I arrived. We had classes for five hours a day and homework for five hours a day. It was a great immersion program but after about a month I was so frustrated because I wasn’t doing any science! I was working full time, learning a lot but I just kept thinking “I just want to be a scientist, that doesn’t work for me!”. This is just one example that tells me that it would be very hard for me to do something else. I can’t even imagine not being a scientist.

  And to finish, fortune cookie question! What’s the craziest thing that ever happened to you in the lab/field?

In Germany, when I was a student, 50% of our lab was female. But many Germans never assumed that women would be scientists so whenever I would order something, the package would arrive addressed to Herr Dr Buchman (not Buchanan). It would always be ‘Herr’, not ‘Frau’. That’s what I became known as!