Universities have been the main sites of knowledge discovery since the Late Middle Ages. Six hundred years on, will the role of the university as society’s primary source of new knowledge be eroded by government and industry agendas?
In this episode, Sarah is joined by Professor Chris Moran, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research at Curtin University and John Curtin Distinguished Professor Fran Ackermann, to discuss the future of university research.
Professor Chris Moran is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research at Curtin. Chris has been involved in research for more than 30 years in natural resource and industry areas, and has also served as a research leader at the CSIRO and at the University of Queensland.
John Curtin Distinguished Professor Fran Ackermann joined Curtin Business School in 2012 as an internationally recognised researcher in the areas of strategy and complex project management. She has also served as Dean of Research in Curtin’s Faculty of Business and Law.
This podcast is brought to you by Curtin University. Curtin is a global university known for its commitment to making positive change happen through high-impact research, strong industry partnerships and practical teaching.
Got any questions, or suggestions for future topics?
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au
Curtin University acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which Curtin Perth is located, the Whadjuk people of the Nyungar Nation, and on Curtin Kalgoorlie, the Wongutha people of the North-Eastern Goldfields; and the First Nations peoples on all Curtin locations.
OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library.
Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of Curtin University.
This is The Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.
Universities first appeared in the Middle Ages as places where citizens could share their knowledge of society and the natural world around them, and to encourage discovery. They still serve this function in almost all societies across the world, engaging in research as part of their role to provide learning and new knowledge. However, increasingly private organisations are initiating research that can meet their commercial goals. In this, our 100th episode, we focus on the future of university research. With me are Professor Chris Moran, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research at Curtin University, and John Curtin distinguished Professor, Fran Ackermann.
(00:51):
Chris has been involved in research for more than 30 years in natural resource and industry areas, and has also served as a research leader at the CSIRO, and at the University of Queensland. Fran is an internationally recognised researcher in the areas of strategy and complex project management, and has served as dean of research in Curtin's faculty of business and law.
Chris, as you're heavily involved in driving the research direction of a large university, first question to you. What is the future of university research?
Chris (01:26):
Globally, the future of university research is incredibly exciting I think as it has always been. I'm a researcher so I would have to say that, wouldn't I? I think as we look around the world or look around the room you are in, can you see anything, can you touch anything near you that doesn't have research as its source? And the answer is unless you're sitting in a park and you've got your arm around a tree, and if you have, good on you, probably not. Probably anything that's manufactured, anything that's in front of you, any material came from research. So, our society and everything that we have is built on research and transformation of materials, and by far the majority of that historically has come from universities, and I see no reason to be other than optimistic about the future in the same regard.
(02:07):
If we zoom in a little from that kind of satellite view of research and we think about the future in the sense of how individual institutions do things, and how individuals in institutions are enabled to do those things, then we find more tensions, we find more stresses, and we find that kind of overlay of what's the policy of our country, and what's the attitude of our country and the people in our country towards the resourcing of research? And there we find a more challenging picture where we have gradually over a period of time reduced the resources available to researchers. We've developed a system where essentially universities provide academic capability to do research, and then researchers seek the funding required to carry out that research and produce the outputs, and to look after the students, and to provide, as I said at the beginning, all those wonderful things.
(02:52):
So, that that's quite a stressy sort of a system that we operate in. But we have remarkable people, like Fran Ackermann, who figure out how to operate in that system and to enjoy that system. But I think society owes the Fran Ackermanns a little bit of a debt of gratitude over the last decade that I would hope would change in the next decade, with respect to how resourcing might be made available for them to make those transformations.
Sarah (03:15):
And we'll unpack that more in depth as we move through this podcast. But for now, where do you see the future of research headed?
Chris (03:22):
I think we have, in our country, we have five very large universities, and those five large universities have grown commensurate research capability as they've grown student numbers, as Australia has reached into the international market to educate overseas people. And so, the resource flow from that has grown the universities and has grown the research. We then have a population of other universities in our country that we all must do research, we can't be a university in Australia unless we do research, but our outlook and our differentiation and what's special about us then requires a bit more thought. So those five, or some people might say eight conventional universities, have a certain pathway. Our pathway has to be somewhat more differentiated and nuanced.
Sarah (04:05):
All right, let's unpack that pathway in a moment. But Fran, what do you envisage for the future of research?
Fran (04:12):
I think I probably confirm and totally agree with Chris insofar as research touches every bit of our lives. That's the creative, that's the innovative, and that can be from small stents that fit into our hearts, through to processes for society. I think if we look at today's global situation we need research, and we need independent research to help us move through some of those grand challenges. So, we've got sustainable development goals, which can be seen as a grand challenge, and it's going to take the minds of a whole raft of researchers to really try and understand these, and navigate ways through them so that overall society can be in a better place. I think the other thing for me about the future of research is making sure that we make it accessible.
(05:00):
That means I think for all of us learning how to better engage with a wider audience. I think universities can be a little bit self-focused, and we need to think about ways of engaging much more widely than that so that a wider audience can begin to benefit, tap into, and take account of some of the things we're developing, and therefore hopefully be a more intelligent consumer to counteract some of the interesting behaviours that are happening on a global stage where truth is not as valued as we might like it to be.
Chris (05:36):
Can I pick up on one of your points, Fran, if I might, that I didn't in that sort of big picture view of universities in research? A big shift that attaches to what Fran has raised there on grand challenges, and bringing researchers out, and bringing the academic community out to the issues of the moment is the scale of research. Over many, many years research essentially, other than kind of massive, massive things like the Manhattan Project and things that we know about, research has essentially been small teams of people led by individuals or very small groups of research leaders. One thing we are seeing and have seen more and more of a shift is towards larger groups and teams working together, and much more joining up of the design and carriage of the research. What researchers are great at is finding literature and finding one another at conferences, and doing joining up after the fact to build the next brick on the wall. We are seeing a shift now if we are really going to approach grand challenges, who comes together in what way to design to carry out research. And that's a big shift.
Fran (06:32):
And I really like that, because I think the future is around integration. It's around integration between disciplines, which picks up on your point about being a little bit silo-based. We can stop working in our own little discipline but think broadly and pluralistically. I think it's integration between academia, and I'm going to use the word industry, but obviously that encompasses government, policy, etcetera. It's integration between each institution, because we want to be able to bring in the different lenses, and that can be not just from a discipline base but also from a cultural base. Now, that's going to be so fundamental if we're going to start supporting some of these grand challenges, and understand the context, because typically we tend to be a bit myopic in our view.
(07:16):
And if we can understand the wider picture so we don't end up coming up with solutions that work well if you've got a lot of funding, but won't work let's say in a small village in India. So, it's trying to think about context integration, different worldviews when we're thinking about it. So, I agree with you, much bigger teams working collaboratively together, and that requires learning how to work collaboratively.
Chris (07:39):
And for the sources of resourcing, whether they be government, industry, or both in combination to be available at scale. And so, people come together. Researchers are good collaborators. They'll tend to compete in two different ways. They'll tend to compete on an idea or a technical nuance, that's good bench competition, but they will also tend to compete in the acquisition of resources to do it, to get funding. So, the better we can get at providing larger bodies, if you like, of funding that are more mission based, the more likely people will come together to get that rather than to compete with one another and end up with smaller projects. We've done some of that. We've been doing cooperative research centres now for some decades. What we haven't seen that much of is industry and government coming together, or industry itself coming together to draw out the academic sector without some kind of a construct there. Some kind of a governance frame, government driven, government reporting, et cetera.
Sarah (08:36):
So, let's talk more about funding. As you've mentioned, government funding of university research has been reducing, but universities still rely on funding for new technologies and facilities that support different types of research. What's been the impact of the fight for research dollars, and does it mean that universities are beholden to political agendas?
Chris (08:59):
Look, I think there's positives and negatives in all of this. Some may say it's perverse, but the part of the drive for Australian universities to reach out to the globe and offer education to significant numbers of people, millions of people have been educated in Australian universities over the last decades from other countries, that created an incredible future network of humans and knowledge, if we only know how to deploy that, we only know how to engage with that properly. So, that's the kind of big positive side. There's been a suggestion, well somehow that's negative because the revenues that have flowed from that we've then helped grow the universities and grow our academic sector so that our PhD students have jobs, and our groups can grow. But we have this dependency now between the teaching of the international students and the resource management associated with that, and the dependency for research. That's seen as a negative.
(09:52):
And obviously that tension comes with negatives. The counter is worth thinking about, which is Australia didn't do that and then wouldn't have the research strength we've got, and then couldn't really talk seriously about at scale influence over global issues. So, it's a balancing act. Where the government hasn't stepped in where they could and should have, and should now, is particularly around the formal programmes, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. Those two bodies of resources that are competitive funding, that are structured to the agenda of the day as to what the emphasis should be, should it be more industry based, should it be more fundamental, they should have been resourced in line with the growth. And that way you would've had a synergy, you would've had the international student growth to bring the people as the catalyst for a major leap.
(10:40):
But what you've done instead of that by essentially starving ARC and NHMRC is created a hunger that has to be met. A positive of that, is it's been met by going and looking more at industry and putting far more pressure on the industry to say, "Look at this wonderful intellectual capability to solve problems and define the future." Negative side. Where's the independence? How do we do that other work? And then the basic science, it's okay for BHP not to fund basic science. They do mining. Who's responsible for basic science? Society and government. And so, we really need to address this now.
Fran (11:12):
Yeah, totally agree. And I think the independence one is a difficulty if you put all your eggs in one basket, there is a vulnerability to that. But I also think the more that we can work with industry, and that goes back to our integration again, industry can support in terms of funds, but it also, one of the things Australia's really great at is its research. One of the things it's really bad at is the applicability of that research. And so, if we work more with industry, there's a greater chance of that bi-directionality going on and becoming co-creation of knowledge, which just means that it'll be better research. The quote I've always liked is, "There's nothing as practical as good theory," which comes from Lewin. I really believe in that. So, I think there's something really useful there. I think the other thing about resources is this idea that we have to have it all our own in-house.
(12:03):
And this goes back to working collaboratively across institutions, particularly in the science and engineering, probably not so much in my own school and discipline, but where you've got some really sophisticated pieces of equipment, mass spectrometers, et cetera. The utilisation of these is rarely at the 80%, 90%, and therefore how do we find ways of collaborative working where we start to share these resources in a more effective way? Whether we're sharing them with other research institutions, with industry, whichever way is going to provide value added in terms of funds, but also in terms of stimulating ideas, in terms of creativity, et cetera. So, I think there's real resources, and if we go back to the question about international students and you take a dynamic long-term perspective, then these students are going to go back to their home countries and hopefully they'll have had a really good experience and therefore keep connections.
(12:59):
And about 10% of them do. And even that connection is made, you've got the opportunity to continue working with them, or even possibly philanthropic donations. So, trying to get yourself onto a virtuous feedback loop there I think could be a really vital way of demonstrating useful research, funded research, ranging from that spectrum of demand driven application and foundational sort of more basic science.
Chris (13:28):
We've got an involvement in a new program from the government known as Trailblazer. The idea of the previous government was to have a small number of universities that would push forward in commercialisation at a rapid rate and at scale. And Curtin was successful with a proposal with partners from University of Queensland and James Cook University. One of the fundamental issues in there, or one of the fundamental criteria if you like that we had to meet, was how would we make the university's infrastructure available? The specialist kind of research infrastructure that Fran's touching on was a really important part of that, because you can't just open the door and have a company come in to use specialist infrastructure. You also need to have all of the process and support structures around that, and proper workflows. And if you want those facilities to be able to operate at time and scale to meet kind of semi-commercial or pilot commercial propositions, then we need some transformation in there.
(14:19):
Another part of the infrastructure opening up opportunity, which is huge, is entities that are usually small or medium size who want to try things, who want to bring things quickly into their own company's product lines, or even to start companies with new products. And they would like somewhere to work to do that. So, they would like to bring equipment in and they would like to bring people in, and they'd like to see students in and around those things that they do. So, there's a whole new opportunity here for universities to say, "Well, what of our physical infrastructure may be of interest for a whole different way of doing research?" Which touches on a very interesting issue that we talk about a lot, which is, is the physical campus a finished thing with online education? And here's a somewhat unexpected pathway to say, "Well no, not at all."
(15:05):
How many students will flock to the university where they can work directly on interesting and challenging problems that are near market with people who are running those companies? So, now they have this opportunity to see a career step from a research programme or a research degree to be instantaneously with industry, to actually remove the barrier not to have a wall between the university and the industry anymore. So, that part of our system I think is moving very quickly, and I'm very optimistic that that issue that we're not so good at applying what we do by taking quite a different approach to starting the way people are involved with that, that some of those walls will just be moved. We'll just not have them anymore. That's my kind of vision for the Trailblazer.
Sarah (15:45):
Can you give me some examples of how and where Curtin is doing that well already?
Chris (15:50):
We have excellent opportunities for industry to access our current research infrastructure for information flow data and information flow that feeds directly into their processes. We're very good at characterising minerals. We are very good at knowing about the assemblage and the distribution of minerals inside rocks, and therefore how that applies to engineering processes for example, without being kind of overly specific. A wonderful example would be we have a thing called an atom probe, which is a cutting edge piece of equipment that takes a tiny, tiny slice of rock and then knocks the atoms off one by one, and then produces a three-dimensional picture of the atom distribution. Curtin University is the kind of place where one of the first things we did with that piece of equipment was supply information to a gold company about the distribution of gold in a part of their ore body.
(16:37):
They could measure it, they could find a lot of gold, or they could not recover it. Now, our people were able to go back to them and say, "You can't recover it because it is individual atoms inside that ore. It's not small pieces of gold that you can't liberate. So, the only way you're going to get that is to dissolve that rock." So, that's very fundamental to very practical, with no gap between the two of them.
Sarah (17:00):
Fran, I could really see you nodding along to some of the points that Chris was making earlier. What was coming to mind for you?
Fran (17:06):
Well, I think there's a number of things. An awful lot of companies, particularly those that are starting up, and I think there's two benefits. Not just the scientific that Chris was talking about, but also the business side, because not a lot of people who start up are familiar with some of the nuances of running a business ranging from project management to HR, from good business cases and getting the financing, and venture capitalism through to marketing. What you're doing is essentially eroding those boundaries. It's not going to be town and gown, but this sort of pluralistic environment where I think it's going to be very creative. And I think the point Chris touched on was it's really going to help our students as well. This idea that students are separate from research, teaching are separate from research, I think is a really unhelpful one.
Chris (17:57):
Thank you, Fran. Go Fran.
Fran (17:59):
And I say that as a researcher. I think one of the best things about teaching is how much you learn from teaching. There's nothing like hearing you say something to giving you new ideas about how it might work, or being questioned. Now, the more mature student gives you more feedback on that front. So, I think a really obvious place is to work in the exec ed and the MBA spaces, because they are more challenging, which is an enjoyable ... Well, some of us, enjoyable experience. So, they challenge you, they get you to think about your research through a whole range of different lenses that you wouldn't have the opportunity to touch anyway. But you also start building connections with them. So, here teaching with our post experience builds relationships, integration, which then that stays in their mind, they think about it, they get a problem. Now they know who to come and talk to, because one of the really big problems with universities is they're not easy for industry to access.
(18:58):
Where do you start? Where do you go?
Chris (18:59):
Curtin?
Fran (19:01):
I was talking generally, I know we're an exception. So, I think there's something really nice about, again, blurring that boundary, because the exec ed I teach, they get to hear about things cutting edge. That's the value add for them, but they also get to hear it through the questions of others in the class. But we all build relationships to keep that blurring of boundaries and that livelihood going.
Sarah (19:27):
And that must really be exciting as well to help really stimulate ideas, and to reshape research questions potentially along the way with the way that you are engaging with students.
Fran (19:36):
Absolutely. And I think some of the best insights I've had is from people saying, "Yeah, but why not this way?" And you start off by going, "But that's a really good question." And you try and note it down, and then you go back and you start thinking those questions through. The other really lovely thing is, "Oh, could you come and do some consultancy?" Which is the first step of getting into the door to working collaboratively. And I think that may be something else universities perhaps should think a little bit more carefully about is not being quite as sniffy about consultancy as has happened in the past. And I'm going to be a bit soft with this because I'm not trying to put too provocative a point, but quite often consultancy is seen as just money grabbing, whereas actually it can be an incredibly powerful way to either build a relationship and then be able to do research with them, or even get research data because you're doing this work with people. So again, it's that blurring of boundaries.
Sarah (20:34):
There's so many points that we could jump off the back of right there, Fran, but I'm so glad you raised the point that we were moving towards, which is how does research help to really inform the teaching experience as well, or the student experience and teaching. One other area I wanted to move into is having a look at how Australia really punches above its weight in a few research areas, but we still really lament the so-called brain drain. What can we do to retain and build our research capacity? I'm throwing this to either of you.
Fran (21:07):
I think first thing is that starting to be known for tackling some of the really big problems. So, here at Curtin we've just set up the Institute of Energy Transition, and that's really lovely because if you can get enough critical mass, well people will want to come and work with people. Research is really a social, people-oriented industry. So, if you are building something that firstly is valued from a societal point of view, that brings together a whole lot of really creative but also different people. So, one of the really lovely things about this institute is one of its missions is to try and integrate the different disciplines, to try and be able to think about it and leverage those competencies that are already there but not really being capitalised upon. So, I think one way of bringing people here is to have exciting projects that people want to come and join. There's that I want to be part of that team, I want to be moving in that direction.
Chris (22:04):
I think there are so many dimensions here. The wall breaking that we keep talking about, or the opening up of the university and the reducing of the distance between the university and industry. Fran was giving the example of research ideas and rethinking coming from teaching. Well, it also comes from working with companies. People lament and they say, "Well why won't company X pay for my research project?" It's the wrong question. The right question is research the right tool to help find an opportunity for company X? And now I have my place in the conversation to find at the beginning. And the students that will come to me to work on the issues and opportunities that are framed that way, they're not going anywhere. They're going either to that company or another company, or staying at that university interface. And I'm highly optimistic that we'll be attracting people to our university, the people who want to see the research frame, the research methods, the research way of being as a way of being the industry of the future.
(23:01):
And a university that's saying, "That pathway is not only valid, it's encouraged." And you can have a career where you bounce in and out of university and industry. It's not a problem, it's not a failure, it's a reward. It's great. So, I think that the growth of brains is the thing that we should be thinking of, and the attraction of people. And the question is our economy, and is our political system, and our society ready to absorb those brains, and to keep those people here, and to maintain a society that sees that future change, and sees the university's role in helping driving that as really important.
Fran (23:32):
Can I pick up on that? Because it goes back to that separation, or rather lack of separation between teaching and research. Because if you've got international students coming over, bright, brainy international students coming over and working with us, using the Trailblazer experience as one, they are getting the chance to not only understand cutting edge concepts but have a go at applying them. Then they're going to get excited about being here, and want to stay here. And so, what it does is it provides us with feedstock for doctoral students, which is a lifeblood of university, they're absolutely critical. It allows students to get excited by research, because they're now working with lead researchers. So, I think this idea that they're separate, this is just another example, if you want to manage the brain drain really capitalise in these wonderful international students coming over and tap into those bright brains.
Chris (24:25):
And even if they go home, each student going home telling five other students that Australia and Curtin University is a great place to have this very different experience about how you learn, and how you set yourself up for a career, works for everybody.
Sarah (24:38):
What about for existing members, or existing researchers as well? How does the university go about encouraging them to really continue that type of wall breaking down and accessible research?
Chris (24:52):
So, we have been doing that. This university is on a very strong pathway of growth and development this way, in that we've got a research strategy that says ultimately at the bench between researchers it shouldn't matter whether you were working on an opportunity or a challenge that you've derived by working with a company, or a group of companies, or a government department, or whether you are following a challenge of your own curiosity and being resourced via grants. The mutual respect for these two pathways are these two ways of doing research changes the DNA of the university. That's the first fundamental that you're not some other person doing some other thing because the source of your resourcing and the outlook of what you are producing in its pathway is different. That's incredibly important. I think the other thing is that the, and Fran's touched on this, and just have to keep emphasising, that research and teaching are fundamentally connected.
(25:44):
We're an institution that creates new knowledge, that we steward knowledge, we transfer knowledge, we have a responsibility for knowledge fundamentally. We create these two categories of doing that called research and teaching as though they're separate, and then we carry on strategically and in other ways of maintaining that they're separate things, and then we create separate cultures around them. So, we've got to reverse this. We've got to go back to the fundamentals of what it means to do discovery and to utilise and steward knowledge, and the nature of the students you can see in our conversation. We're seeing students in a very different way as collaborators, as co-learners, and co-producers of the future with us, and partners, not empty young brains to be filled up with our didactics and regurgitating the responses.
(26:30):
Just a quick offshoot here, I don't know whether listeners know, but this morning Microsoft bought ChatGPT-3 at 49%. Today the world changed. Tomorrow, as a result of that today Microsoft Word will come embedded with ChatGTP-3 at some point. Your word processing device now will produce the information that would previously have needed to be produced by reading books, accessing information, interpreting that information, and then presenting that to a lecturer. The world just changed.
Fran (27:01):
Fundamentally, that one, but that still supports the need for research because all that particular system can do is work on what is and exists, and we must keep moving forward. And I think that's really critical. And in terms of supporting staff, I think it's a whole raft of things. One is mentorship, but that mentorship is bidirectional. So, perhaps those who are more senior can support entrée into industry to those more junior, but those more junior can support those more senior in terms of how to access, use, social media. It's not a one way trip. And I think the other thing is diversity. It's trying to pull in all sorts of different mindsets, and that's ranging from engaging schools, because that's a particular mindset, engaging different genders, the whole spectrum.
(27:51):
Each time we look at it through this different set of lenses, we increase our chance of a really creative but also sustainable outcome. And so, I think supporting staff, providing them with these skills to be collaborative, that's really critical, I think. Academics, hitherto, have been quite comfortable with being in their little avatars working on their own or in small teams. I think finding ways of encouraging, supporting, facilitating collaboration I think is going to be really critical, because that's where the creativity comes, from that clashing together of different paradigms. That's where you see a new opening.
Chris (28:28):
I wouldn't like to risk leaving this conversation all rose-coloured. You've asked a really serious question, and we've both given you really optimistic responses. Perhaps we should had a black hat in the conversation today. There are really important issues for people involved in research in our university system and in our university. Precarity of employment for early career research is an issue for us. We have a large population who we can't bring into continuing appointments, and therefore they're on a two, three, four, five year, if they're lucky, contract. And so, these people are young people in the main looking all the time for what opportunity will give them more stability in their lives and in their professional career. And we don't have a sufficient scale of resourcing to wave a magic wand on that. So, I think that it's really important that we recognise that, that we talk about that. We have serious diversity issues in our universities, and others, where we start with a balanced gender at the early career stage, and at mid-career we are still not too bad.
(29:29):
And then as we move into seniority, we've become really heavily male dominated. Obviously that is in part, but not only, around the years of childbearing. And so, in the main we lose women from the workforce for probably two reasons. One, the exit point, but our inability to have really mature and well-developed re-entry. If you're particularly a smart woman and you leave the university for a period of time to have children, and the male counterparts are all advancing their CVs and the weight, if you like, of themselves as researchers, and then you are being asked two to three to four years later, "Would you like to come in and stay behind them all so that you can then play catch up for a decade?" The smartest women are going like, "Well, I don't want to do that. That's not reasonable." And we now understand some of those problems, but we're not flexing fast enough. We're trying to. We're trying to, I think, get much better control in the hands of those who are in that situation. We're trying to get more flexibility of resourcing to that.
Fran (30:27):
Can I pick up on one thing from that? I think something else that I think Chris is right, we have been both positive, but that might say something about us. I think the other thing is trying to get the balance between compliance and the ability to do research. Researchers last century had virtually no checks and balances. Ethics did not exist. It probably should have, but it didn't.
Chris (30:49):
Ethics processes. I'm sure ethics existed.
Fran (30:51):
Oh yes. Yeah, you're right. What we've seen now are really quite an extensive, time-consuming, onerous set of conditions over research. And one example in particular that I've been talking to with colleagues in the life sciences is because of this compliance field trips are becoming more unlikely to happen. And how that impacts research, particularly for our HDRs, our doctoral students, is going to be significant. And so, I think another really big challenge is in the era of compliance, and not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Sarah (31:27):
On that point, we're going to pause for a quick break. We'll be back right after this ad.
Voice-over:
While we take a quick break, let's talk about technology. Of course, there are all different types of technology like the kind you use to listen to this podcast. Then there's a kind that can help you predict a disease outbreak before it happens. Technology and big data are changing what it means to be a healthcare professional. With Curtin's unique graduate certificate in big data and digital health, you can learn how to analyse vast data sets, including machine learning techniques to help drive better decision-making. So, whether you're a healthcare worker or graduate from a health or non-health background, if you want to enter the field of data analytics, this online course could be exactly what you are looking for.
(32:13):
Applications for this and many other post-grad health courses are now open for 2023, search Curtin post-grad health and make tomorrow better.
Sarah:
And we're back. Now, I want to know a little bit more about the both of you. Chris, you've been involved in research for more than 30 years. What type of research were you drawn to, or why were you even drawn to research do you think?
Chris (32:42):
Well, it was the day I met this chap called Scott. He was a lecturer of mine, and we had to do a project for our fourth year university to complete the honours. And mine was as reductionist as you could imagine. I was dealing with the plotting of where zircon grains are in little thin sections of soil. And I was mapping these things to figure out how far apart they were, and therefore how much the soil had weathered and shrunk. And I remember the very moment where I looked at Scott across the table and I said, "Can you really do this for a living?" He said, "Yeah, it's called research. It's what scientists do." And I said, "So, what do I need to do to become a scientist?" Because this sense that I was seeing things that no one had ever seen, that was the essence of it. Peering down this microscope, doing this sophisticated numerical analysis on these maps that I'd produced, and I knew that I was the first person to ever see this thing, that was the tiniest little thing that I saw.
(33:34):
And his response was pretty simple. He said, "You've got to get a hell of a lot more marks between now and the end of the year than what you've got now." So, I worked pretty hard for the rest of that year to try to get myself into a situation of getting a scholarship to do a PhD.
Sarah (33:46):
Well, I hope Scott is listening to this. Fran, you have been published extensively, five books, 24 book chapters, and more than 60 peer reviewed journal articles. What do you love about research?
Fran (34:00):
Playing with ideas. I love the creativity. I love being able to work with people and find ways of, particularly for me, helping messy, complex decisions. I've always been interested in those decisions where there isn't one single right answer. The complexity prevents that from happening. You've got multiple perspectives, multiple criteria, all these interacting little bits of information. How do you start making sense of all of that? How do you help people manage the content of their problem, but at the same time manage the processes needing to be navigated to arrive at an outcome that is not just cognitively bought into, but also emotionally brought into, so things actually happen? I, unlike Chris, didn't suddenly get inspired by doing research. In fact, after seven years of boarding school and four years of university, the last place I wanted to be was back in an institution. Unfortunately for me, after a year of wandering around Europe and some parental pressure, it was, "Go and get yourself a job, dear."
(35:02):
I got a job as a researcher because it sounded fun. And at that point I suddenly found somebody who actually was interested in decision-making. And up till that point, unless you did very mathematical models, there was nothing out there that I could find that allowed me to play with complexity, and decisions, and individuals working together on those decisions. And so, my one year as a mere research assistant, he persuaded me to do a PhD, which rather remarkably I loved, and then I just didn't manage to leave. And I'm not sure I'm going to anytime soon, because I just love that idea of working with people to make better outcomes that are sustainable.
Chris (35:41):
It's interesting from those two very different perspectives of a start point, that actually we're both in a very similar place now. So, what I do for a living now is I see pictures, I draw system connections, and very much what Fran's talking about, how do these things that we know and the bits of things we don't know need to come together so that we can design change, and that we can really begin to face these grand challenges?
Fran (36:02):
Yes, and that's exactly the research topic I'm working on at the moment, is being able to help people navigate and negotiate ways through grand challenges.
Sarah (36:12):
I look forward to finding out more. And I think the same thing, two completely different journeys but a very clear shared love in research. Thank you, Fran and Chris, for both coming in today and sharing your experience and insights.
Chris (36:27):
Thanks for the chance to chat.
Fran (36:27):
Thank you.
Sarah (36:30):
You've been listening to The Future Of, a podcast powered by Curtin University. As always, if you've enjoyed this episode please share it. And don't forget to subscribe to The Future Of on your favourite podcast app. Bye for now.