STEM SUPERSTARS:
the woman making waves in science and technology
Melissa Little The DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGIST
It was about five years ago that Professor Melissa Little had her Eureka moment. Building on her early research, she was attempting to use stem cells to grow a kidney. At the time, the treatment for kidney failure hadn’t changed in more than 70 years and Melissa believed the latest stem cell research presented an opportunity to change that.
It was a risky proposition. “We might not have succeeded at all,” she says. She had already explored and dismissed several other possibilities: “Can an adult kidney repair itself? A little bit but not very well. If we put some other types of stem cell in a kidney, would it do any good? No.” She counts off the various theories she had explored in the lab.
“It came down to the fact that the kidney is really formed before you’re born so we were going to have to recreate a tissue the way an embryo does.”
A passionate developmental biologist and creative thinker who, in her youth, had harboured dreams of being an artist, Melissa wanted to explore the potential unlocked by recent breakthroughs. “I think that’s what scientists do,” she says. “They follow what they’re curious about.”
But much like the painters she so admired, who relied on patrons to support their work, she knew she needed outcomes to secure research funding. Melissa was seven years into the project when one of her staff members called out in excitement: “You’d better come look at this!”
“We looked in a dish and said: ‘Oh my gosh, this actually looks like it’s making structures that look like a kidney’.” Even now, she thinks it is miraculous they were able to get a stem cell to make something that’s a reasonable model of a developing kidney. The breakthrough paves the way for many new discoveries. “Can we use it to model disease?” she says. “Can we use it to find new treatments for kidney disease? What would happen if you transplanted them? It is pretty exciting.”
Melissa found herself shifting away from the theoretical towards the practical. “I started to think: it’s great that I do great science, but what’s that going to do in the long term? Was there anything that I was doing that was going to make a difference?”
Kidney disease was a growing global problem but the only options for treatment were to pray for a transplant or navigate life on dialysis.
“I started to ask, what does kidney disease mean? If we can understand how we made the kidney, is there something we can do to fix the kidney, or re-create the kidney, or treat the kidney in some way other than what we’ve been doing so far?” Melissa says. “Science is a very creative process actually.”
Abigail Allwood The ASTROBIOLOGIST
Dr Abigail Allwood’s laid-back, self-deprecating manner belies the fact that she is one of the most impressive scientists Australia has produced. Working out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, the diminutive redhead is a principal investigator on the space agency’s 2020 rover mission. That makes her the first woman (and first Australian) to oversee a scientific instrument on an expedition to Mars.
The instrument (called PIXL) is her own invention, created to detect even the most ancient signs of life. Is she quietly confident it will do that?
“I don’t really want to answer and jinx it,” she grins, “but if I could answer without jinxing it, I’d say yes.”
Abby grew up in Queensland, the daughter of a pilot and a stewardess-turned-nurse. “Neither of them were scientists but my grandfather was an organic chemist,” she says proudly. On her first attempt at university, she “studied physics and failed miserably”, and her grandfather, she jokes, “probably thought I was a hopeless case at that point.” Second time around, in her late twenties, she topped the class in her first chemistry exam. “I called and told him. My grandmother said that he hung up and said, ‘Those girls [Abby and her sister], they’re alright.’ That was the biggest compliment. The following day, he died.”
Abby’s interest in science didn’t blossom until third year university, when a lecturer explained the scientific method.
“That’s what got me hooked,” she explains. “It was a whole philosophy, not just a way of solving problems ... It was the process of discovery itself, which is everything, the entire excitement of science.”
Abby’s ground-breaking PhD work in 2006 identified the oldest evidence of life on earth and as a result she made the cover of Nature. Her work was spotted by NASA and a year later she was ensconced at JPL. She’s excited by news of the fledgling Australian Space Agency because it means future scientists won’t have to leave Australia to pursue their careers.
Almost 12 months out from the mission’s launch, if someone offered her a ticket to Mars, would she go?
“Sitting in a tin can for eight months: no thanks,” she says. “I love the idea ... but I can explore so effectively with robotic tools. I think ultimately it will be up to robots and humans to explore space. We’ll do it together.”
Alison Harcourt The MATHEMATICIAN
Numbers were mathematics pioneer Alison Harcourt’s first love. In the early 1930s, her parents enrolled her in the country kindergarten at Colac, in regional Victoria, and there she was taught to count and from that moment on she was enchanted.
“I thought this was fun. You can do lots of funny things with numbers,” Alison, 89, says.
That early interest sparked an illustrious career that has spanned decades, and research that has influenced efficient computer programming, the way that we understand poverty and a change to the Electoral Act.
After completing her schooling she enrolled in Melbourne University’s mathematics honours course, where she was one of only two women out of 20 students. A conversation with an engineering graduate who had been applying a technique called linear programming while working in the oil fields of Bahrain inspired Alison to investigate further.
The work she did on what became known as ‘integer linear programming’ laid the groundwork for a paper Alison would co-author on a method known as Branch and Bound. The paper has since been cited more than 3000 times.
In the mid-1960s Alison worked on a project to measure poverty in Melbourne. “Nobody quite knew in numerical terms what poverty was,” she says.
A team of social workers visited households all across Melbourne, and Alison did the computer work to analyse the data. Computers were very new at the time. Melbourne University only had one.
“People these days laugh at what its limits were, but with the aid of that computer we managed to create tables. We arrived at a definition of a thing which we called ‘the poverty line’,” Alison says. “That’s where the term ‘poverty line’ comes from. You won’t find any reference to a poverty line in things published before 1960 and I did all the computer work on that survey.”
Despite working in a maledominated field, she says she only confronted sexism “slightly” and “indirectly”.
“There wasn’t a lot of communication and collaboration. What collaboration there was tended to be male to male, so one tended to be left out,” she says.
To this day, Alison continues to inspire young women and men as a sessional tutor at Melbourne University, and believes more should be done to engage students with maths from a young age.
“Numeracy is just as important as literacy and you should start back in bubs beginning to have fun. You can have fun with numbers and you can make it all more interesting,” Alison says. “It is a beautiful subject.”
Tessa Vance The PA LEO CLIMATOLOGIST
Dr Tessa Vance knows all about extreme weather. The 39-year-old paleoclimatologist grew up between rainforest and reef in sugarcane country in far north Queensland. “It was very green, very humid, it rained a lot.” It had nothing in common with Antarctica and the ice-cold lab in Hobart where Tessa has spent her working life.
Tessa studies ice cores, collected from deep in Antarctica, to understand changing climate and weather patterns over thousands of years. What excites her about her work?
“Just the idea that a piece of ice can take you back in time and teach you what the climate was doing from before historical records,” she says. “Most of the ice cores I look at go back over 2000 years, but there are ice cores that go back 800,000 years. The Australian program and the Europeans are about to try to drill for million-year-old ice.”
Why all the fuss about ice? “They are the only records that actually trap air bubbles,” Tessa explains. “So scientists can capture and study air that was in the atmosphere 100,000 or even 500,000 years ago.” And that’s important today.
“Ice cores really proved the cycles of the greenhouse system. They proved that when you have lower amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, you have lower temperatures; when you have higher amounts of C02, you have higher temperatures. You can very clearly see the ice age cycles and the interglacial periods, like the one we’re in now.”
Tessa has studied the way fluctuating C02 levels correlate to fluctuating temperatures, has identified sulphur from erupting volcanoes, and mapped patterns of drought and rainfall in Australia – all from Antarctic ice cores. While not wanting to be alarmist, her work makes her worry about the future.
“The earth is resilient but there’s only so much you can do to it, and the climate system is quite responsive,” she says. “I have little kids and I wonder what kind of world we’re leaving them.”
Tessa has two daughters, Gracie (six) and Leah (two) and leaving them behind when she travels is, she says, the greatest challenge of her work.
“I try to only go to Antarctica for a couple of months and only every few years, but if there’s a project happening, you have to go,” she says. “I went when Leah was 10 months old, and Grace was only 11 months the previous time. On the ship, I wake up in the morning and lie in my bunk for five minutes, trying to push all those feelings about home down so I can function for the day. It’s tricky. Then, coming back to a 12-month-old who you haven’t seen for two months, you get some strange reactions. I’ve had my cheeks pinched to make sure I’m in 3D again.”
There are upsides though, and chief among them is the icy continent itself.
“It’s other worldly,” she says, “especially in the middle of the night in summer, when the sun ducks below the horizon and there’s lots of purple and pink light ... I remember the first time I camped out. It was a very clear, very cold night, there was an aurora and I was sleeping outside in Antarctica. It was pretty amazing.”