Okay, so welcome to a new stem interview series. Today we have with us Dr. Shane Huntington from Melbourne, Australia. And he’s a seasoned researcher, science communicator strategic analyst. And we’re really glad that you’re here with us today. Just as a start, would you like to give us a bit of a summary of your journey? In your from research to what you’re doing now? Why is your work important? What are the different projects you’re working on? Yeah. Well, so I did start off as a as a researcher. I did a degree in physics and a PhD in physics and worked in two main areas. One was optical fibre technology. So you know, the, the small little pieces of plastic cloak coated glass that, you know, go around the world that allow us to have really amazing telecommunications? Yes, yeah. Absolutely. So did a lot of work on those. And in particular, some specialty fibres, the sorts of ones that aren’t used to work across long distances, but might be used to move through the other areas of the body, where there’s sharp turns, and things of that nature that are a bit more difficult to traverse for those those sorts of devices. And alongside that, I also did a lot of very high resolution imaging. So I built something called an atomic force microscope during my PhD, which was, you can buy them now, in fact, I have a company in Australia that sells them, but at the time, you know, we had to build them. And so that was a, that was a big part of my PhD. And it you know, it was something that, you know, we we couldn’t look at things at that resolution back then very readily. So the only way to do it was with these sophisticated instruments that allow you to look at things down on the, you know, the atomic scale. So, did that, and then worked as a researcher for about 10 years after that, and ended up in an area, which was really quite fascinating. It was some called quantum encryption. And this was where you use some of the features of quantum mechanics or quantum physics to actually store and distribute information in a completely secure way. So what we were trying to do, we had a very large grant and I ran a centre to try and produce a device that would give you individual photons on tap. So one of the things that’s sort of hard to get your head around is, if I turn the light on, I get literally hundreds of millions of photons every second, I could filter those down to get just a few. And that’s relatively easy. But if I just wanted one, and never wanted to get two, so I wanted to either get zero or one, that’s really hard to do. And so we created some devices to do that. And we thought we actually sold them out of Australia. For a short period. I left that physics career, after about a decade, and I moved into the vice chancellor’s office, actually, so I became a non academic staff member of the university. And that was really interesting because I, first of all, I got to write the university strategy. So the strategy for the University of Melbourne, I wrote with the Vice Chancellor, that was a year long project involved so many different consultations and stuff, but it was really, incredibly valuable to me, I went to like, the vice chancellor at the time was also an incredible writer. So he was already a good writer, that’s how I got the job, but he taught me a lot more. And then I got to do other things that I never got to do as a scientist. So for example, I got to go and work with the Victorian College of the Arts, which is part of the university as well, and I got to work through all the people, you know, from dance, and film and television, and, you know, the fine arts and so forth. As a physics guy, you know, it was kind of like we never interacted with, with people from that part of the campus. And I learned more. Sometimes I say, I learnt more there than I did in the science faculty, because it was the stuff I didn’t know, right, it was the stuff that was really interesting to me. So did that they moved on into a similar strategy role in the medical faculty, for sort of the last 10 years, have just left the university a few months back, unfortunately, that was part of the, you know, the pandemic restructures that are happening across the world for many universities. But you know, after such a long period of time, it was so nice to go and try something new. And alongside that, of course, the whole time. I’ve been doing my radio show, Melbourne, which is sort of one of the probably leading science radio programmes and you know, interview 270 odd people a year and, and have been doing that I’m about to hit my 30th year so a lot of science communication. I do a lot of science communication training as well outside of that, so there’s a quick snapshot for you. It’s been a lot of Big changes, and I’m about to start running in about two weeks Actually, I start running it as CEO a charity called Little Big steps, which is a charity to help some children with cancer. So looking forward to that. Yeah, you have so many different roles. And yeah, first career, what do you feel like most? Like? Do you still feel like a physicist? Do you feel like a science communicator? strategist? What? Yeah, something. All of this? Yeah, look, it’s a really good, interesting question. Because one of the reasons I left science was because I didn’t like being a scientist, but I love science. And that hasn’t changed. But the job of being a scientist today is a real tough one. And most, you know, about 30 to 40% of the time has just been begging for money, frankly, through systems that are really poor at assessing who should get their money. I, I’ve always applied the skills, I learned problem solving skills, I learnt being you know, being a scientist to everything that I’ve done. So whether I do strategy work for people now, or I’m, you know, being a science communicator, or teaching people to science communicate, I, I still use those same problem solving skills and those logic skills and so forth that I learned early on. And I think, you know, that’s been the consistent piece that’s run all the way through for me. So yeah, yeah, I completely agree with it. I have exactly the same view on academia. I love research. I love science, but I really don’t want to be the one who’s doing all the research anymore, I agree. So as a strategist, do you actually work on that as well how to improve the academic life? academic community? Yeah, so I’ve done a lot of work on that over the years. Part of it’s been, you know, recommendations to government on how to change funding structures and programmes. Part of it has been writing articles myself on this, you know, I’m in the middle of writing an article at the moment, actually, on grant, Grant programmes. And you know, there’s some simple things here in Australia that we need to do. I mean, a good example of that is, you know, you have people writing these 100 page applications, and then waiting, you know, six to nine months, getting almost no feedback, and then being told no, with a, you know, 7 to 15% success rate. I mean, this is, this is just foolish, at best, you know, it’s a really poor system. And look, other systems around the world have similar problems, I think else is one of the worst, we, we have a situation here where to me, given that most academics think of it as lottery, you’d almost be better just to run the lottery. But you know, what, what I what I think is important is to say, you know, have a expression of interest round, where, you know, you literally cull 70, or 80% of applicants, but it’s a five to 10 page application, they find out within a month or two and only a small number, get asked to do something more significant. With it, this is something that we could do straight away, and it would would help with mental health of all of our researchers would give them more time to actually do research, which is what they’re supposed to be doing. And it just be fair, it would be simpler and fair. So I do that a lot of that sort of work around around policy also spend a lot of time actually especially during the pandemic, doing work to help with PhD students and mental health. This is something that’s really crept up on me because I wrote an article, a couple of years ago, this this article came off a discussion I had with, with a PhD student in Tasmania, and she phoned me up and she was really worried and thinking of quitting her PhD, and I gave her a hold of advice, convinced her not to she’s since finished a PhD, and has a great postdoc position, which is fantastic. But it made me think maybe I should just write some of this advice down. So I wrote an article the 10 steps of why you should quit your yeah the, title, you know why you should quit your PhD. But really, it was about why you shouldn’t and all those reasons that people normally think of leaving for like, for example, yeah, my supervisors are absolutely terrible a hole of a person and, you know, treats me like garbage, all these things that really are not reasons to give up on your career. But what I found was, I think, you know, that that articles being read some 30,000 times a year around the world, and there’s a really big serious problem with student mental health at the moment, and it’s growing, and it’s getting worse. And very few if any institutions are doing doing very much to resolve it. So I spent a lot of time in it, especially during the pandemic. I gave a lot of talks on that as well. is really important. Yeah. Okay, so what’s the most the most you learned out about this, especially now in the pandemic about mental health of PhD students? What’s one tip that you would give any PhD student? Yeah, look, the one thing I would I would give as a tip to PhD patients at the top of the list for me is to adjust your expectations on yourself. You’re not going to be able to achieve the same things that you would normally have been able to achieve before. This wasn’t happening. Whenever someone says, you know, we’re all in this together, that is the biggest nonsense, because you know, the way to affects you individually is going to be different depending on your personal circumstances. And there could be all sorts of things that are affecting that. I mean, it could be that you don’t get to go and see an ageing relative, or it could be that you’re a long way from home and not able to get the support of family, it could be that you’re financially strapped because you’ve lost your part time work. It could be that you haven’t been able to go into your laboratory for six months, and all your experiments have just been thrown out, because all the mice were euthanized. Or it could be it could be a range of things. But it’s it’s individual. And we have to really adjust our expectations on ourselves for getting everyone else for the moment, adjust ourselves and say, I shouldn’t be expected to do things as if this wasn’t occurring, I’m going to be fair and myself here, give myself a bit of a break. And you know not there’s already enough pressure on PhD students, I don’t like to see them putting more on themselves as a result of the pandemic. Definitely, yeah, that’s good advice. Very well. So you’re also training researchers in science communication, to just talk better about their research? Why do you think researchers need this training? Yes, this is an interesting and somewhat, you know, can be controversial. But to me, there are three really important skills for pretty much all researchers that we should learn, we should start learning in high school, actually, not in secondary education, not even in tertiary education, but we don’t learn them all in tertiary education. Neither one is mathematic skills, I think this is important for pretty much all, especially in the sciences. But you know, even though areas as well. The second is, you know, our ability to write, you know, to, you know, build these in, in whatever language we’re working in, you know, whether it be English or French or whatever, you’ve got to learn, learn your languages in high school, and so forth. But the third is communication as a as a distinct skill. And this is something that we don’t learn, and we don’t teach. Now for, for scientists, this is particularly important because most most research is kind of irrelevant, if we can’t communicate it to someone, effectively, it might be that we’re communicating it to a granting organisation, or through publications, or through government for policy changes, if we’re working in health or medicine. Or it might be that we’re just, you know, talking to some school kids to encourage them to do stem. You know, communication is really important. And we have to be a lot better at that. Great examples of this moment that are, of course, you know, happening live with the vaccination problems around the world and issues around, you know, whether people should be wearing masks and all the different things that we’ve gone through during this pandemic, a lot of is really a symptom of very, very poor communication skills on on behalf of many of the people involved. And that’s, yeah, this is a situation which is very serious. And if I can, Sarah, I’ll give you an example where this really blew up a few years ago and why I think it is an example I give whenever I teach in, in the Italian city of L’Aquila, there was an earthquake back in 2008, or nine now, a very serious one, a little over 300 people died. One of the things most people don’t know, is that about a week before that happened, there was a meeting of an emergency sort of group that was put together with six seismologists and one government official, and there were, they’d been a lot of pre shocks to this big earthquake in a foreshocks. And there was some concerns that there might be a big earthquake coming, the, of course, for shocks on the predictor of major earthquakes. And in fact, it’s very hard to do any sort of earthquake prediction, as as I’m sure you know. But they had this meeting, the scientists made a statement akin to there’s no indication, you know, as a result of these four shots, there’ll be a major shock. And that’s true, because there’s no science that connects those dots at the moment. But the government official went out to the public and communicated that science in a way that led the public to believe there was no danger at all. In fact, he even recommended a particular wine to drink to relax that night. Anyway, a week later, there was a major earthquake, and there was some 28 ish 29 people who died, specifically because they didn’t follow the advice. They’ve been taught all their life because they were unduly feeling safe because of this information that came from this scientific group. Okay, now, what then happened was there was a huge public outcry. And all seven of those members of that committee went to jail for manslaughter. Now, as you might imagine, the scientific community responded and there was a petition with some 6000 signatures from across the world to have them released. I think after a period that the scientists were released, the government official was not but you can see there were poor sign miscommunication can lead to a loss of lives. If we fast forward now, a little over 10 years to what’s happening with with COVID, we’re seeing that extremely poor science communication is is actually costing lives in many countries all over the world. So, to me that the sort of the evidence of the importance of being able to communicate your Sciences is clearly there with many examples. And, and in some fields, it literally cost lives and not necessarily in the field you might expect. Yeah, definitely true. Yes. So you interviewed like over 1000, researchers, yourself and being active as a science communicator? What would be your number one tip for a successful interview with a researcher? To get the, best out of it. Yeah. So look, the number one thing I think you have to do is, so let me give you a little hint about how I interview first, and this is not something you do first time you start interviewing. And it’s been three decades for me to get to this point. So but generally, people say, Oh, how much preparation you do before an interview? And I said, Well, usually between interviews, we play a bit of music. And that’s when I read and do the preparation in that sort of three minutes. That’s it. But that’s because I don’t write questions. I asked, you know, always have a first couple of questions in my head. But then I listened to the answers. And whenever you’re interviewing, interviewing a researcher, every now and then there’ll be something that they say when they’re just a little bit more excited. Yeah. And you’ve got to, that’s what you got to find. And you go after that, yeah. Because that will, that will get you the best interview, because that’s the part they’re passionate about. And you’ll hear it in their voice. Sometimes I just get a little bit more animated or a bit more excited about one particular thing. And then all of a sudden, you know, you’ve got it, and you go after that. So, and that’s one of the reasons why I don’t like you know, having large numbers of questions rewritten because you, then you people just skip over that they don’t pay attention to it. So the key thing is really listening to, to the person you’re interviewing. Yes, well, yes. Yeah. Listening to the they’re trying to hear where their excitement is mean that they get up every day. And they do this every day. They must love it, right? I mean, it’s long hours, it’s hard work. They must love it. And you’ve got to work out why. That’s that’s what people want to hear. They don’t want to hear the details who cares. numbers don’t matter. They want to hear about the people and why they why they care about. Okay, so what has been your favourite person to interview then why you thought Oh, man, really passionate about whatever they do? Do you? \ Yeah, I’ve got some. I got some big favourites. Yep. Can I can I give you three very, very different reasons. So one of my absolute favourites is a little girl named Mei. She is um, she’s now seven. I think I’ve interviewed her every year for the last three or so years. She has primary immunodeficiency syndrome. So her immune system essentially doesn’t function. And every year and this was done, we started doing this before COVID came around, we would interview her about the importance of immunizations for everyone else and research into this area because you know, her life is at stake. And she was wearing a mask long before any of us ever were to protect herself. Interviewing little kids like that, that go through so much. And her mother comes along and she has the same condition name is Louise. Absolutely Fabulous. You know, to me, I get a huge amount out of that. And the other two that I really loved. The first one was a guy named Gene Cernan. He is the last human being to walk on the moon. And for me, that was I’m a huge fan of all the moon landing stuff, the Apollo era, all of that, okay. And that was a particular privilege for me to actually just to get to do that. And I’m, sadly I’m pretty sure it was the last person to interview him before he died just a few years back. So that was amazing speaking to him and talking to him about you know, his experiences, walking on the moon and so forth. So that was a particular thrill for me. And the final one, which is someone who I have just an immense respect for a lady named Jocelyn Bell, I’m not sure if you’ve met her full name is Jocelyn Belbin l she, she is in the UK. She’s an astrophysicist. Most people don’t know her name, but she was the researcher who discovered the pulsar, which is a type of stellar object that sends pulses out very, very large pulses in in space and we detect those. her supervisor won the Nobel Prize for that discovery. And she was not recognised at the time, classic, really terrible stuff. She’s probably one of the most noted examples of that. But she she’s an amazing, amazing woman. The first time I met her was in Melbourne and the And I love the interview with hers because I first interview her 20 years ago. And when I was pretty young in radio hadn’t done a lot and had dinner with her did the interview, it was really amazing. And then I interview there again, just last year, I think it was, so 20 years later, and we had a very different discussion because I was able to talk to her about her entire career over that 20 years between the two interviews. So for me, that was, that was great. And she’s just an amazing woman, she just won this, this really big award, I think something like 3 million pounds there in the UK. And she’s, she’s donated the entire amount to a programme to help people get into stem from underprivileged backgrounds and so forth. And, and, you know, it’s just, you don’t see that very often. So just a kind, brilliant woman who should have won the Nobel Prize, but but unfortunately, it was, you know, stolen by a supervisor. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you’re both like a radio host, but also a writer, what do you prefer? More? Like? I mean, both are really important communication strategies. But do you prefer writing or talking presenting videos? Yeah, look, I do really enjoy the writing. It’s something I’ve been doing more of, and my wife is a really good editor for me, like, it’s pretty brutal, but is excellent, you know, like, makes my writing better. Always. The radio stuff, though, is great. I mean, there’s, there’s a huge audience that you get to speak to, it is such a privilege to do that. Nothing feels better than I bring, bring a PhD student or something in and we get a really good interview out of them, you know, they walk in nervous, the first thing they do is asking where the bathroom is, because they need to use it 10 times before they go in air. And they’re feeling really anxious about it, and, and you bring them in, you make them comfortable, and you get a really great interview. And unlike commercial radio stations, were often this sort of that gotcha media where they just they kind of want to get you to say something that’s controversial. We don’t do that. We just try and get the very best out of our interviewees and, and it really is fabulous. When that happens, and you see them happy. And you know, they share it with their friends and family. And so I think radio is probably, for me, it’s the thing I really enjoy or put time into. Yeah. Okay. And how did you get into this? Did you just try it out? Or just did someone invite you, hey, you want to give this interview or? Yes? No, it was, was absolutely the latter I was I was working in the School of physics at Melbourne University, and one of the other physicists in the building was on the show that I now run. And he got me on as a guest. They really liked me, and just coincidentally, he left for an overseas postdoc shortly thereafter. And they wanted the physics person. So they asked me back, and there was almost 30 years ago. So that was, it was just a bit of luck. It was just a bit of luck, but, but the amount I’ve learned about communication doing that, that I’ve taken back into other things in my life, whether it be grant writing, or paper writing or giving lectures has just been profound, you know, you learn very fast radio is a bit of a cutthroat industry. You know, if you don’t do well, they kick you off real fast. So, okay, you’ve got to learn really quick. Okay, well, I wasn’t aware of. Okay. Okay, one, one topic I want to talk about is that you are currently based in the US in Australia, sorry. And from personal experience, I know that Australia is handling the pandemic very different, pretty unique way. Apart from the world. What is your personal take on this? What do you think Australia is doing? I mean, there’s no right or wrong, obviously, because nobody knows what is right or wrong. But just to have your personal opinion about all of this, because I saw that you write a couple of pieces on this as well. Yeah, yeah. This look, there’s a lot going on there. I mean, first of all, I would say, early in the pandemic, last year, all of our governments came together and for a brief point in history, they were all essentially speaking with one voice with regards to the pandemic and seem to be cooperating very well. We closed our borders very early in the pandemic, when we had outbreaks we locked down really hard and, you know, citizens in Melbourne really felt that, you know, we, we had breaches in our hotel quarantine, which led to close to 1000 deaths, which was terrible, and a very long and harsh lockdown in Melbourne, which, you know, for a lot of people was very, very difficult, in particular, you know, schoolchildren and so forth, that we’re learning from home, which is pretty dreadful. But it paid off. You know, we, we spent, you know, we will be paying for this adventure for 30 years as a country because we had programmes to assist those who’d lost their jobs and companies that didn’t have income and everything was shut down. So there was a lot, a lot of programmes. Now, fast forward to today, and things have changed a lot. And one of the articles that you’re referring to I wrote with a with a friend and colleague from the rural Children’s Hospital named Maggie dension, about the types of, you know, the types of things that would be required in terms of communication, if a vaccine became available. Now, you know, this, this was written back in September last year, so almost a year ago now. But a lot of it was about listening to the community having one clear voice, all of these things, which unfortunately, now we’ve gone the other way. And we’re in a unique position here in the sense because the risk of COVID at the moment is fairly low here. Although right now, as we’re doing this, this recording, there’s quite a substantial outbreak in Sydney, which is very, very concerning, and a few little spot fires around the rest of the country. But we’ve we’ve had very few COVID cases here. And what happens when you’re in that setting, is that some of the organization’s responsible for for drug safety and recommendations around vaccines start to produce, you know, communicators that talk about the risks of the vaccines themselves and compare that risk to us having no COVID cases. And, you know, if you do the numbers, you know that the bottom line is that the worst thing you can possibly do in this country in most countries is getting your car and drive somewhere to get a vaccine. That’s the really dangerous part of actually the driving part. You know, there’s been, there’s been some, you know, 80 to 100 deaths on Melbourne roads this year alone, you know, it’s, it’s, that’s the worst thing you can do. But vaccines do come with some risk. You know, but we were used to accepting risk for many of the medicines that we take, you know, women would be very aware of that, for things like the contract safety pill, there are risks with flu vaccines, but the information being put out, has been sort of churned up by our local media and turned into these incredible fear campaigns that have basically gutted our ability to utilise the AstraZeneca, the Oxford vaccine. And that was the sort of main, you know, the workhorse of vaccines that we were going to use here in Australia, primarily because we have a local company called CSL that can produce the vaccine here in Melbourne quite readily in very large quantities. So, you know, we’re in a situation at the moment where we’ve scared the hell out of everyone with regards to the AstraZeneca vaccine, but we don’t have enough of the Pfizer vaccine to go around. And I think this is a this is one of these privileged positions we have where we don’t have a lot of COVID. We haven’t experienced the new Delta strain is yet. So we’re just seeing that now in Sydney. And it’s a lot harder to control than what we’re used to. We have a leakage rate through a hotel quarantine system, which guarantees some cases, even though, that the hotel currently knows so well say I mean, there’s guards everywhere. That’s what I heard no, you would, you would hope that those guards had proper protection, so forth. But in some cases, you know, they’re the ones getting infected, and so forth. But, but this has also come from a complete lack of sort of precaution around the idea that this is an aerosol transmitted virus, you know, so in some cases, it’s taken people even now I’m hearing sometimes people sort of not willing to admit it. And yet we know, we know that this is true. And so the bottom line for me is that we took some very smart actions early last year, which really saved us from a lot of grief, and a lot of deaths. But now we’ve moved into a stage where we’re failing in the area that I love most, which is around the communication of science. And you’re even in this last week, there’s been probably four or five different messages from different organisations with regards to the AstraZeneca vaccine that the Prime Minister came out and extended the indemnity clauses for protection of patients and in general practitioners so that they couldn’t be sued, so that everyone could get the AstraZeneca vaccine. Previously, you know, we have a group that recommends safety around vaccines, and they basically said no one that you know, no one under 60 should give it or their, their wording was the preferred vaccine was fine, even though that wasn’t available to everyone. If you’re under 40, here in Australia, basically you weren’t able to access vaccines at all. Australian Medical Association said that they agreed with the atagi group on these cautionary issues around the AstraZeneca vaccine but also agreed with apparently it was like who I’m not sure who to believe there. We had some state premiers saying the Prime Minister’s version of this is true like the one in Victoria, we’ve had a lot of COVID Yes, everyone should just go out and get vaccinated with whatever they can get, you know, and other ones are saying, This is outrageous. We weren’t told you can’t give it to people under 16 No one in Queensland will be getting it. And the public must be watching this show. I’m watching this as a scientist and science communicator and just thinking, Oh, what choice do I make here? And then and then we have people saying things like, you know, you go to your local practitioner, have a discussion, so you can make an informed decision. Now, if I was a GP hearing all this, too, I’m not even sure what advice they could possibly give. And it’s so confused at the moment, but that the core is that the communication is being hijacked by other agendas, political agendas, click agendas for newspapers, you know, there’s nothing like a picture of a blood clot on the front cover of a newspaper to sell newspapers, even though the chance of getting it you know, it’s like, you know, what, one in a million or whatever the numbers are, like, so, so small, but all of those other agendas are hijacking the communication of this. There’s a few people who are doing a spectacular job. But overall, the community is very, very confused. I’m going on radio tomorrow morning, and I have to talk about this and, and part of me is not even sure I should tell people anymore. I was Yeah, I was just ready to ask. So what is it? What are you doing about it? Like? Are you actively campaigning? Are you giving? Are you talking to politicians? What are you doing about it? all the above. So I did quite a few interviews with people who I know a good solid communicators. So not, I’m not doing interviews with the people who are just trying to give a name for themselves. Through this process, and being contrary into anything that’s put out there unhelpful. history will judge them badly. Because if, if we have major outbreaks here in Australia, it will cause you know the loss of life. And they’ll be responsible for that if these people aren’t vaccinated. I’m doing all sorts of weird things. Like when I first got my first dose of Pfizer, I couldn’t we have an online booking system that was just non functional, people couldn’t get through. And so I actually just turned up to one of the big vaccination hubs because that you could just turn up and wait. And I stood outside for five and a half hours in the cold. To get my first Pfizer shot, I live tweeted that entire experience, it was very funny people who follow me on Twitter, remember, there was this guy named Joel, who was standing in front of me in the queue. And he was he was into a gardening sort of business or something or other. And he said to me, at one point, you know, we get really stressed I, you know, just start working in the garden. And about four, four and a half hours in poor Joel just lost his shit. And he started weeding the garden outside the vaccination hub, like, people with people are going crazy. But it, you know, but it was an experience. And, and when I went back the second time for my, you know, three weeks later, or so, to get my second dose of Pfizer, you know, I took my 13 year old teenage son there, because I wanted him to see what this look like, you know, I grew up in a world where, you know, I think there was a couple of movies where we saw something like this, but he didn’t see this sort of stuff. And I wanted him to see, you know, the importance of good health care and science and what they can do. And, you know, he grumbled a little bit, you know, as a teenager, which is fine, we had to wait for a little while, but, you know, got my injection felt like absolute garbage for several days, I tweeted all about that experience, did my radio show half day, the next day. But it was, it was important to be honest about the fact that, you know, relative to what COVID could do, to me, this was a very, very smart thing to do. And I wasn’t just doing it for me, you know, I was doing for people like that the young girl I mentioned earlier, and named may who, you know, she doesn’t have a functional immune system that can protect her, you know, she ends up with COVID She’s dead. And we need to protect people like that, you know, and it’s, it’s our job to do that. So I’m doing as much as I can. I’m trying to I’m trying to absolutely beat down people who are putting, you know, scare mongering type messages out there. But, you know, there’s a few of us doing it. We’re doing our best, but yeah, it’s a big problem. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah, that has been Thank you so much. It’s been really interesting. Now, at the end, we’ll always have a couple of random questions that don’t have much to do with science or your work, but just to get a bit know a bit more about you personally. So can we just start with those? Yeah, go for it. Okay, so the first one is, what was your favourite subject at school? Oh, well, I mean, one of the things that often surprises a lot of people when they talk to me, I’ve had this question before is that my favourite subject and my best subject when I did my high school in the high school exams was actually English. And, you know, it’s really rare especially in physics for someone to say that, you know, Most people say mass but, but for me, it was English. I really enjoyed English I enjoyed writing, I was lucky, I had a really good English teacher and the later parts of my schooling. But when I went to university, I, I, one of the subjects I took, when I first got to University of Melbourne, I lined up in this very long queue, it was like getting vaccinated staying there for six hours waiting to get my subjects back in those days when it wasn’t electronic. And I wanted to do astronomy first year astronomy, because I wanted to be an astronomer, or astrophysicist. And when I when I got up to the desk, the guy behind the desk, you know, so the reason I’m sorry, that subjects not available anymore, the the lecturer died last year. And I was like, Oh, I came to this university to do this. It’s the only reason I came here, I wouldn’t have come here otherwise. And so I ended up doing a subject which was offered in the arts faculty, which was called a history of astronomy, which sounded pretty close. But that ended up being well, we ended up actually fulfilling that sort of love of English, because it was, it was all about writing, it was all about reading all these amazing books about the last sort of three, three and a half 1000 years of astronomy and what that looked like. And that ended up being the best, those four, three subjects were the best subjects I ever did at the university. And they were the ones that I learned science in the philosophy department at Melbourne University, I didn’t learn in this in the science faculty. I learnt that the bits and pieces in the science faculty you had to do experiments, all those sorts of things. But the philosophy behind science, how science works, the stuff that’s really carried me through. I learned that from the philosophers, because they really, you know, thought deeply about that which is great. Interesting. Yeah, it’s important now as a science communicator, like, Yeah, absolutely. What you’re doing. Yeah, that’s right. All right. So the next question is, then, what are you truly passionate about? And just one sentence? I have to say, my, my kids, you know, like, I that’s a cliche, but you know, I’ve got two boys, one of them has absolutely no interest in science whatsoever. The other ones still young enough to think it’s amazing. But you know, I spend a lot a lot of time with my kids and I. I you know, really, for me, just making sure that they they get to grow up with a great education, you know, doing good things, having good experiences, and you’re getting getting them through all this stuff. Yeah. So that’s, that’s a, that’s a big part for me. And with them, and alongside that is, you know, one of the things I think is really important that I tried to teach them, this is just the idea that mental health is health, you know, we section it off, we give it a different name, we we pretend it’s subordinate, but it’s not. And, you know, it could be 50 years before we really get this entrenched in society. But your mental health is such an important part. Now. I want my kids to be able to talk about their mental health in the same way they talk about a broken bone. And I hope they get to grow up to see that I think it would be a great thing because it really does matter a lot. So it does, yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah, nice. Oh, so what next question is what are you most proud of that also your kids also your voice? Look, you know, always proud of them, but you know, they can they can be rough and tumble. What am I What am I most proud of? Ah, look, I think it’s hard. I did teach something a few years back, which turned out to be really good, which I was I was particularly proud of and that that was I set up a programme in low socioeconomic schools called telescopes in schools. So I had some money at the University of Melbourne that I could have taken a salary but I decided to do something else with it. And talking to one of my colleagues and my first ever supervisor, actually a lady named Rachel Webster, professional professor, Rachel Webster, she was an astrophysicist and so is at University of Melbourne. And she, she and I decided to put together a programme, which was to buy 10 research grade telescopes that we brought 1012 inch Schmidt cassegrain made telescopes which are worth a lot of money. And we located those in 10 fairly poor or you know, relatively poor suburbs of Melbourne. And then we we went out to those schools and we would help the students and teachers to learn about the night sky. And this this programme is sort of set up off some money within hire that an old, an old friend of mine who was a school teacher looking to get out of that into something else and she came to run the programme at Melbourne Uni. The programme now has money from a foundation that, you know, that helps students here in Melbourne, and so it’s ongoing and there are more telescopes now than 10. But there are all these different schools and I can tell you, when when, when these kids look through this telescope at something like satin, and you just hear them so that they take a breath of air, you know, sort of gasp that’s a proud moment when you’ve given those kids that experienced. So that’s something I’m, I’m particularly proud of. Yeah, you know, I, I didn’t put my name all over it. I’m just happy that it’s there and going and, you know, yeah, it’s a really good programme. And I think it’s the only thing I know of the only thing I know of where there are students, their siblings, their parents, their teachers, and people from tertiary institutions, all in the same setting. Talking about science. You never get that mix. Right. Yeah. And it’s been, it’s been really powerful. Amazing. It is. Yeah, that’s such a great project. Well done. Yeah. Okay, next question is what do you do in your free time? Oh, well. Well, I guess we’re locked down half the time. What do I do. I play a few computer games and my boys, I, you know, we have a couple of cats, my wife and I, you know, we try and get out and eat and do things when we can. You know, that’s, that’s certainly a good thing. Yeah. I, I’m a really slow reader. So if I’m reading, if I’m reading a book, it takes me forever. Okay. But, but I do watch a lot of TV and Netflix and stuff. We, you know, always with the family. Yeah, a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff in the family. You know, it’s um, you know, I took my boys to hit some golf balls at the driving range the other day, that was, that was a bit of fun. You know, watching watching my teenager trying to cop horses, you know, that’s fine. But yeah, I used to do, I used to do a lot of karate. So I got my karate black belt a couple of years ago, but I’m not doing it anymore. Just I got to the point where I was feeling injuries, you know, when you get to a certain age, your injuries take longer to heal. And I had a few broken ribs and so forth in the last few years. And it was it was getting a bit hard to recover and work at the same time. So but yeah, it hasn’t been go for walks. I listened to a lot of music. Music When I’m when I’m working, when I’m working or not. So yeah, I mean, as a radio host. Yeah. There’s always music and brochure. Yeah, you know, the one thing I don’t do a lot of listen to radio, surprisingly, you know, when you when you’re on radio, although some people do, but some of my colleagues are the same. They, you know, you sort of go in there, you do your thing. And then you’re out. You do other things you try. You don’t tend to think about it all day. So. Yeah. And the last question, my favourite one, what would you do if you were donated $10 million to your project? Ah, $10 million? Well, look, one of the things I think I would want to do right now with that kind of money would be to set up a centre for health communication. So I would want a specific centre that deals with nothing but assisting with the communication of information on health. This was something we needed long before the pandemic. I mean, you see this all the time when people read the news, and it says, you know, oh, coffee increases your risk of this and something else decreases your risk of that and you’re trying to work out what you should do as a consumer into sort of inflammation is nonsense. These risk comparisons are absolute nonsense, they don’t help anyone, their publications, the putting to the press, because they’ve got nothing better to write about. But But putting that information out in a way that isn’t helpful is problematic, maybe if you’ve got really legitimate information, like drinking alcohol, but anytime, really, but drinking alcohol during pregnancy has really serious risks attached to it, then that’s information you want to put out. But some of these other smaller things where there’s real you know, it’s really subtle, just confusing. Yeah. Just confusing to people. And, you know, we’ve, we’re suffering at the moment from a vaccination uptake problem in many countries in the world, and in particular in the US are about to hit a hesitancy wall. We haven’t hit that yet in Australia, but we will soon. This is something that’s been a problem for very long time. And part of that is because we haven’t bothered with it. You know, we’ve never sung the praises of how amazing our vaccination programmes are the fact that smallpox is no longer. We haven’t talked about that enough. We haven’t talked about how great vaccines are as a science, because everyone just assumes they’re always going to be around. And now we’re at the point where we wish we had, we wish we’d done more work in that space to help people understand, and we left this giant gap. And all the anti Vax movements just jumped into this gap that we left and they had no competition. Really. Yeah. And but at the moment, you know, what we really need is a group of people who are experts not in health, but in communication, because I don’t expect everyone to be an expert in everything. I think this is one of the things that’s important, especially in this area in health at the moment, the majority of the health people I know are not good communicators. And yet they’re putting information out in a way that’s actually potentially damaging. They need assistance from really good communicators. And if I had $10 million, I’d set up a, a centre specifically to assist with that programme to help with to help to help with how to how to communicate things effectively. Yeah, yeah, even things like, um, you know, the idea that when I get vaccinated, I’m not just protecting myself. I’m protecting those around me. That’s what, that’s what being part of a community is about. I truly understand why so many people at the moment are fearful of vaccination. You don’t have to read very many news outlets before you find an article every day about problems with vaccines. And, you know, this scares people and it’s okay, for people who don’t know much about it to be scared. I think that’s reasonable. But, you know, we really have to, we have to notch up our communication skills. So to me, the centre dedicated to that, you know, I’d love to just, you know, buy a really nice car or something, but no, I think dedicating dedicate that to the money. You have, if no one wanted to do that, I’d say back to the issue of PhD mental health and setting up really solid, good resources to, you know, to do that, and that would mean using your 10 million to leverage another 100 million or more of government to do that in the proper way. Yeah, that would be a great cause. Definitely. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. It has been an absolute pleasure for me to learn so much about communication and physics and everything. Yes. It’s been great. Sarah, thanks so much for inviting me. It’s not often that I’m the one being interviewed. Normally, I have to do all the work and feel so much easier when you’re on this side. Thats good. That’s good. Okay, so yes, thank you so much.