The pressure you’re under in climbing is… you get in a position where maybe you get
to do a hard bit and you get to an easier section, and you think, okay, I can hang on
here for quite a bit longer.
But I can’t hang on here forever.
And I think that’s not unrelated to academic success.
[music]
Good girl, yes Koshu.
Yes.
Koshu come.
Good girl.
[laughs] She’s back!
Awww.
Over the last six months I actually made some really really good progress on some research
I’m doing with the Australian Labor Party.
I surveyed their membership basically to find out who their members out, what they think
about certain political issues, what they expect from the party.
And it’s pretty significant research because it’s the very first time that one of the
Australian major political parties has agreed to let an academic in to do some research
with them.
[Off-camera voice] And also you picked up the dog on the way.
Yeah, she was one of the key KPIs of the SOAR project.
And this is her very first day in at work so it’s a significant day at work for Koshu.
As you can see she’s very impressed with the new building and the sleeping facilities
that it offers.
Which is probably no different from a lot of the students and how they use the space,
particularly around exam time.
Yeah it was really exciting to get a VC Award in Teaching and Research.
The other award was the one I was most happy about because it was for the data-driven astronomy
MOOC that we developed.
This is an online course that thousands of students are doing to learn about modern astronomy
techniques.
As astronomy became a science, we were able to start asking quantitative questions and
making high-precision measurements.
And that was a real team-effort.
I mean we had everyone, senior staff, postdoc, PhD students, professional staff – working
together to get that going and it was great to be able to celebrate that with the whole
team.
[music]
The conference itself is…
The theme of it is looking at global health security so it’s all to do with managing
adverse health events as they potentially spread around the world.
I think we’re now at the point with the conference where we’ve probably got enough
money to break even between the conference registrations, exhibitors and all that sort
of thing, which is great.
I’ve become shameless in asking for money, principally because one of our key ambitions
for this event is to be able to subsidise up to 200 people from low income countries
to come.
Could be looking at up to $5,000 per person, and when you look at 200 people that’s a million dollars
to fundraise.
[music]
The abstracts actually are closing today.
We’ve had a lot of interest in the conference.
The World Health Organisation’s going to be formally involved.
The World Bank, and several other institutions – the government of Canada, Finland, Australia
– they’ve all gotten behind this and given us quite a bit of money to help support people
coming from low income countries.
One of the pieces of work that I’ve been working with the WHO on has been building
this database and a new monitoring tool to track when governments put in place trade
and travel sanctions for during disease outbreaks.
And that’s been identified as being a really big problem for the international community,
it really impedes public health efforts and it harms economies.
So the first publication from that research is actually being published in The Lancet
today.
It’s signalling basically to governments: look we’re going to be watching you much
more closely.
[music]
Yeah, four and a half months I was in Dresden, in former East Germany, working at a Leibniz
Institute.
It’s very well-funded.
They’ve got a lot of infrastructure we don’t have and the ability to do things we find
hard to do in universities, by virtue of having more centralised discretionary funding.
I was away for long enough this time to get the proper benefit of sabbatical.
Sort of in three months you – it’s not quite long enough to disentangle yourself
from what you do when you’re back in your own office and then focus more on the research
projects you’re interested in.
Just towards the end, almost got to the point where, you know, I felt you’re getting towards
almost too relaxed, or too on sabbatical.
You know, I start thinking ‘this is really nice but I probably need to be back under
pressure again’.
[music]
We’re celebrating the end of a big clinical trial that’s taken – since 2012 – so
it’s been six years since we’ve started this.
We’ve come towards the end, it’s time to celebrate and say ‘well, look at us,
look at what we’ve done together, we’ve really done something fantastic’.
Everything takes so long in research so what has been great with the SOAR program is that
I’ve been able to fund the final analyses, the final data collection, the final treatment
of participants, the final analysis of the data in depth.
So now we’ve been able to put all that data into that paper and write it up and we’re
really excited about sending that to the journal very soon.
[music] Interviewer: can you tell me about what the
last 16 or so months has been like?
The last 16 months has definitely been the most intense period of my whole career.
Obviously the big result, you know, detecting the gravitational wave event and all the subsequent
media, as well as trying to do my normal job – that keeps going regardless – has been
really intense.
I’m completely exhausted.
It’s hard to appreciate that two years has just flown by.
The time has gone so quickly.
You may not think of yourself as someone who gets things like the SOAR Fellowship, but
this one may be an exception.
I went into this and applied for this without great hope.
Because I thought, I’m just, this doesn’t happen to me, I don’t get these things.
I do okay.
But it came along.
In two years I guess it’s made an enormous difference to my career.
The opportunity to go and do this work with WHO has just sort of taken the research to
a whole new level.
I think one of the fantastic things about SOAR is that you don’t necessarily need
to invent a new project.
It makes use of what you’re already doing to sort of build up capacity.
Without the SOAR Fellowship I would have lost three really key people in my team.
And that would have meant we wouldn’t have been able to collect and analyse certain key
data for the clinical trial.
It has been actually really good to have these other SOAR fellows sort of travelling these
similar paths at the same time.
[music]
It has been a bit weird having you guys follow me around though.
In one word – awkward! [laughs]
I think it’s given me like a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little insight into what it must
be like being famous.
And I think I’ve definitely decided I don’t want to be famous.
Interviewer: I remember you were, I think you were pretty sceptical that we were gonna
capture if –
[laughs] I think we’ve graduated, here.
I’m in this very attractive settee with a dog next to me.
Put it this way, I’ll be looking forward to the end of this, where I can just go back
into my office, and keep doing my research.
That’s cool.
[music]