Interview: Dianne McGrath
OK, this one is going to be tough to top.
I was wonderfully fortunate to chat to Dianne McGrath with an amazing life lived, and more to come. Website. Linkedin.
Highlights from me;
- Learned science by mail as a kid.
- Constant aim to experiment in all parts of life.
- Had to join up with another high school to study physics.
- Loves both scientific and fluid thinking.
Enjoy:
Dianne — thanks for your support of She’s Building A Robot — a novel to inspire teenage girls into a world of STEM.
Here is the auto-transcript. Should I get proper ones?
hi everybody it’s mick labinskis here
from she’s building a robot
um and i am with diane mcgrath diane’s
joining me from space
no from uh from from melbourne but
um definitely has her
wonderfully has her head in the clouds
about some of her ambitions
and she’s agreed to come and tell a bit
of her story about um
her journey into the world of stem
and uh to share that that journey with
you so in
what a wonderful diverse background um
so
dying welcome to the to the uh podcast
and thank you for sharing your story
oh no worries mick it’s fantastic to be
a part of it thanks for inviting me
no problems i’d love to start what was
your first memory ever
of uh an experience with sort of
technology science engineering or maths
like was there a
school lesson a class a camp or
and and and what was the spark that sort
of sort of got you into that
oh my first i think the first strong
memory
of being involved with something
sciencey mathsy when i was a kid
was when i was living in the outback in
the northern territory
i was about probably about 11 i think at
the time 10 or 11
and we my family just moved from
adelaide
in the adelaide hills um town called
handoff
and we moved to the outback literally to
the desert
in the northern territory um quite some
hours
out from allen springs and we lived on
an aboriginal community there
and my brothers and i were doing our
schooling by correspondence and in those
days that was before school of the year
was very big
and so what this correspondence school
would do would mail
that mail us our schoolwork it’s a
little bit different to the
isolation remote learning at the kids of
today
um isolation remote learning was was a
big
package um for our science so they would
send us these
massive like really big boxes that were
full of fun looking stuff we had no idea
what it was it was
test tubes and beakers and all sorts of
random things and
and uh and we had to follow instructions
to do particular science experiments and
then write them up
and send back our answers by mail and
the kits as well
to our teachers back in adelaide uh and
so there was a lot of
you know fun with that because you’d get
the parcel and you never knew what was
going to be in it and you’d open it up
and if you all this stuff in it like you
didn’t know what it was going to be
doing
and so there was this curiosity about
what
we do when we blow something up or just
i think all kids want to know are they
going to blow
yeah exactly well i’ll tell you
something else like do something to the
house what will happen
uh and and then our mother would usually
help
supervise us to make sure that we didn’t
blow something up
but it still was so fun following
self-guiding really about what does this
do
what will come out of this i’m not
watching anybody else do it in the
the science lab at school i’m
discovering completely by myself
so yeah a lot of self-guided learning
there’s lots of fun
wow that’s it’s really interesting and i
don’t i’d love to that there’s a whole
other hour of discussion around
the impact of self-discovery versus
almost forced discovery of like it’s
like you know tuesday at 11 you’re doing
science and okay today we’re doing
experiments and
you’re one of 30 kids and you sit there
and it’s and even if you’re doing an
experiment
you the motivation is quite different
right and you
you every if every day i’m doing science
and it’s like oh that’s a science but if
once a month i’m getting this box in the
mail with anything
like that exactly yeah it was
your self motivation so go again
keep going no no that’s all right um
your point about the self-guided
learning was an interesting one too
versus this is every wednesday at
science class or something
because there was the only sort of
timelines we had were when we had to
send assignments back by and so
we could spend as long as we liked doing
the experiments
or very quickly or we could repeat them
as many times as we had resources
so we had a lot more opportunity to to
spend the time that we wanted to
doing the work and i loved that
absolutely loved it
my brother and i i’m a twin so my twin
brother and i
couldn’t wait till we sat down and did
this work together it was i think the
favorite part of my study when i was
remotely learning do you think it had
a long-term influence on you that the
different perspective on experimenting
that you had time
but there was still a there was still a
deadline and you had but did you
experiment outside the box or did you
always follow the rules
and did you try new things and i’d love
to know there’s a there’s a big
i think there’s a big resurgence in
experimentation culture
in companies especially big tech
companies
and and i think um there’s a there’s a
there’s a risk to it but there’s so much
to gain
and i’d love to know the impact that
might have had on your
career um in uh your in your
your mindset was that was that tough to
work to
to have a career like that because you
were wanting to experiment but couldn’t
or was was that your did you find
opportunities to experiment
well as as a student back then i
definitely
experiment don’t tell my mother but i
did
i definitely experimented with some of
the stuff that
perhaps i shouldn’t have been doing at
the time because it wasn’t the exact
experiment but i was curious i thought
what happens if i do that so and i was
always that that child like what i
wonder what happens if i do
that thing in fact um when i was around
how old would i be
six i think six when my parents still
lived
in the adelaide hills maybe i was seven
i went
one time with my mother to a factory in
the brosser valley
where she would pick up large supplies
of some of the pickles and preserves
that she would sell
through the store that they owned in the
hills and i went
the factory was so fascinating there was
all of these belts and rollers and
people wearing cat
caps and coats and buttons and
what is this place how fabulous and then
there’s this big
red button next to one of the big
machines
i thought i wonder what happens when you
press that button
and yes i was begging to be pressed
the button was pressed and i didn’t sit
down for a week i don’t think
my mother just went i stopped the entire
factory everything went to standstill
the sirens bled it was
so i’ve always been that curious that
curious child i wonder what happens if
um so yes that’s self-experimentation
it’s i’ve
carried it with me through my career as
well um and whether that’s been in the
pharmaceutical industry
or when i worked in government but
particularly these days
what i do in my career i try and i try
and
find new and novel ideas sometimes
sometimes something hasn’t been done
before or you don’t know if it’s
possible to be done
and so that’s where that curiosity think
ha
wonder how that works and can we make it
work so i’ve always taken that approach
like for example
my biohacking or even what i’d like to
be doing going to mars for example
if i could have the chance to be
involved with a mission to mars to set
up a sustainable community on another
planet
how would we do that hasn’t been done
here on earth what would we need to do
what are the challenges
how we overcome that can we test a few
things here
so that sort of stuff fascinates me and
it’s why i’ve gone down that pathway
including in my phd i’m trying to come
up with
a new concept or a new idea about how we
can
understand what happens when we waste
food
to try and reduce that so why does it
happen not just because i don’t want
that or it’s not enough there’s
something else happening there
and what can we do to so i’ve actually
tested a particular intervention a bit
of a science project i’ve tested whether
something works to reduce waste
so to develop a science experiment and
to
work out what that protocol would be had
to measure things and i’ve been doing
statistics to analyze whether
it’s been effective or not so it’s
definitely been part of my
my curiosity um to try and find
solutions to things
well and one of my motivations to write
this book was because i heard from a
number of women in
stem careers that they actually faced
pressure through their teen years
because um that kind of curiosity
and desire to experiment just didn’t
ordinarily fall
it doesn’t really ordinarily fall into
many um
traditional careers even for i know it’s
i know it’s 20 20 but i’m talking about
it there’s a lot of male careers which
i’ll at least have some um opportunity
for that
and whereas a lot of the women i spoke
about in stem they said that oh it was
women don’t women don’t do that kind of
thing women don’t do that kind of thing
did you did you find did you hit up
against barrett barriers
and how did you push through them like
how did you find a way to make something
you loved doing
a part of your part of your career well
actually before
my career even um when i was in my final
year at high school in year 12.
i loved i studied chemistry physics
and maths a and b or urine applied or
one and two i don’t know what they
might call in the different states um
around
australia these days but so i was always
fascinated by
obviously our maths and science subjects
and i wanted to study i studied science
um
physics in year 11 but i wanted to do it
in my final year as well
at my school at the time i was going to
a girls school when i finally went down
finished doing correspondence and my
parents sent me to a real school to sit
with real people
and have a real teacher um so for year
12
and and so there was no one else except
for about two other girls that wanted to
do physics
and so there’s only three of us in the
entire school that wanted to do physics
in year 2012
and the school was like well i’m sorry
there’s not enough interest in it
we’re not going to have that subject
available and so
we all keep all of us girls well what
and uh and the scoop of the school found
a solution the school
it bound uh sort of made a relationship
with another school another girls school
where they had similarly only a few
girls that wanted to study physics in
year 12.
so we had a combined class where three
from our school and three from another
school would get together so six of us
was enough to justify having one teacher
cover us which is great because physics
is
is so fun it’s it’s maths with
experiments
that’s really what it was we’ve got to
you know it’s all about motion and
dropping things and
and moving things and so you’ve got to
play with a lot of stuff
and then do the math to to show why it
worked or why that might be a problem
so it was so good to be able to do that
but it didn’t mean having to to step
forward and go hey hang on a sec we want
to do this stuff
don’t hold us back yeah so your barriers
exist
wow okay and um so
did a lot of science a lot of maths and
i love that and
we i’m looking forward to reading your
memoirs which i know that would come out
at some point in the future but um
one day when you get back from mars or
uh
can you give us a quick journey so from
from year 12 lots of science and maths
to today like what are the what are the
big steps you took
and what are some of the um what are
some of the ones that may be
challenging steps or or you know really
really
scary at the time but worthwhile doing
so my first up my first degree at
university after i finished
year 12 was secondary teaching so i
became a qualified secondary mathematics
an english teacher
english because i love english it’s sort
of rounds things out it allows me to
think differently
i like having different ways of thinking
so there’s a scientific way of thinking
but then there’s a more expansive fluid
element of thinking that that i like
from the humanities as well
so i studied that and um i didn’t end up
doing much teaching though just the
initial qualification amount of time to
make sure that i got my qualification
but then it wasn’t work at that time for
teachers and by the time when i
graduated so i moved i i
just got a job working in a sports store
managing a sports store
a little bit different from being a
maths teacher and
not a lot of science involved there but
a lot of math because you of course you
actually had to
to balance books and so accounting sort
of principles there
and while there i met somebody who
worked in the pharmaceutical industry
and and i learned about what they did
and my grandfather had been a pharmacist
and i’ve grown up
as a very young child up to the age of
six spending a lot of time in his
pharmacy
i used to love watching him do his his
work
he was a compound pharmacist which meant
he would make some of the
the actual medications himself so
putting together some of the compounds
to create the medicine for some
equations yeah customers fantastic
so this is was like being in potions um
class during harry potter
you know stuff going on it’s amazing
so so i was always quite fascinated with
the pharmaceutical world as well
so when i met this um someone that
worked in that industry i thought
you can get a job where you can do this
sort of stuff all the time that is
fantastic
so i worked for the pharmaceutical
company gsk
for what turned out to be 12 years
starting off just in sales and
and learning about a number of different
medical areas so
once again here is science uh
understanding medicine and chemistry
biology
and and i worked through the company a
number of different roles that
including them in the medical team sales
marketing
all sorts and eventually i actually
ended up being a global
manager for a portfolio of vaccines that
are used around the world
in the immunization programs that every
single child in australia receives
every baby in australia awesome gets a
jab with a vaccine that i was in charge
of which is
pretty wild to think about yeah yeah so
that was really cool
and that’s just because i was interested
in in immunology as well and and how can
we improve public health and
and so i’m really i was fascinated by
that um so i did that for
under quite a few years then i moved i
took a year off
and back moved back to australia because
i was working in europe at the time
and when i moved back to australia i
went and did some more study
i did a degree in a postgraduate degree
in environmental management and then i
went and worked for the government the
australian government because i was
fascinated to think well how can we
become more sustainable with our energy
systems
we’re really facing challenge here with
climate change
so i wanted to work with the government
to work in in the energy sector and i
have worked in the government’s
department of
resources energy and tourism
specifically looking at our energy
future
um so that was something i got to do
while there and help drive and create a
new law actually
which was something i never thought i’d
get to do create law but that was pretty
cool
um but just because i was fast followed
a pathway that interested me
you never know what you get to do and
that’s yeah that’s what i’m wanting to
encourage some of the girls that watch
this or hear this or read anything
if you follow the pathway that interests
you you
end up doing some amazing things
sometimes you never know what it’s going
to be but if
if you get the education if you follow
with the passion
sometimes the opportunity presents
itself that you would never expect
yep just to be clear you you sound like
a um
a confident bold person but did you
did you feel fear at the time and but
then had the courage to go forward
yes definitely like um one example of
that is um when i applied to be a part
of the mars one
project mick so you as you know i’m a
mars one astronaut candidate i’m one of
100 people
worldwide who are shortlisted at the
moment um in the
election process amazing when i first
heard about the mars one mission and i
saw
that it would be the potential would be
to be part of a crew
or community on mars to live permanently
there
and set up a new society for us
everything imagine if we could start our
work from scratch
what would we do would we keep what we
changed i thought how brilliant would
that be
and so when i applied and you had to
make your application public so i could
see
who else was applying and there were
people that worked for nasa
there were people who were
astrophysicists they were
um like just incredibly smart people
really smart
and and had the sort of qualifications
in the the space
area that i really didn’t have like who
would be interested in me
you know i’d studied a number of
different interesting things and i’ve
worked in a few interesting areas
but i wasn’t an astronaut i wasn’t a
physicist i wasn’t so i hadn’t done all
of those sorts of things that
they might want and i was i was a bit
tentative about whether i’d apply
actually i was
and i thought you know i can choose not
to apply in fact i can pull out my
application at any stage
but i’ve left it in and why because i
thought i’m not going to be the one
that’s going to hold myself back from
this yeah
i want someone else to make that
decision whether i’m suitable at that
time
for that role so i end up pressing
submit
but i was i can remember pressing the
button on like on my laptop i went
submit
the application and then i went you know
big deep breath
and then walked away yeah exactly
yeah who knows what’s going to happen
that’s a that’s a big send yeah
absolutely well done for the
the courage um where is it at now like
that uh is it still obviously there’s a
lot of technology to develop like is
there a timeline for it and how
how does your life fit into that
timeline do you need to stay active in
learning and
participating or are you waiting mostly
um well we can choose to wait of course
until mars one continue with the
selection process with the current
covert situation that we have here in
australia and around the world
there’s a lot of ghost lows on a lot of
different projects
like we know even this month at the
moment it’s july
2020 and there are three mars missions
this month one from the united arab
emirates one from china and one from
nasa
there was supposed to be one from um
from ross cosmos the russian space
agency and the europeans but that’s been
slowed down at the moment because of as
you can imagine it’s a bit hard to
really focus on stuff so mars one’s on
the go slow at the moment but
i’m not i’ve decided well just because
you know
my goal to do that today has been put a
little bit on the shelf
doesn’t mean i can’t be as ready as i
can before that for when it
comes forth again so i continue to to
research and learn
follow what’s happening um upskill
myself as well
and what i do particularly is work on my
physical health and
and some of the biohacking that i do
around that because
for example if if the mars one mission
at schedule at the moment is to say the
first human crew in 2031
after having sent about half a dozen or
so technical missions first
so all the infrastructure to go in
advance followed by
a human crew later once everything’s
been robotically deployed
2031. now i’m 50 actually i’m 51 in a
few days time
so i’m you know going to be in my mid
60s by the time a mission gets to go yep
yeah is that old maybe not the oldest
person’s been in space has been 77
wow which is you know so it’s like okay
so maybe age doesn’t matter maybe it’s
health
and it does that’s the key thing the
head of selection said we’re more
interested in your health status
than your age so what i’ve been doing
has been looking at aspects of my health
it’s like well
i wonder if i can reverse some of that
for example i used to wear glasses
and i haven’t had to wear glasses the
last four years because what i what did
i do
i found out that astronauts about
64 of women and 82 percent of men have
issues with their vision when they come
back from space so
right okay if that’s a problem coming
back from space or being in space
what would happen to me if i already
have to wear glasses would it get worse
so i thought well
i wonder why the eyes do that so when i
went into the research once again that
curious thing
where does it happen why does that
happen and then started researching
what happens with the the muscular
structure in the eye
and then well maybe we can do some
things they can alter
our feet our field of focus so our focal
length
um in such a way that it expands our
muscular ability
and in the eyes and so that’s what i
started working on different musculature
activity with the eye and since then i
haven’t had to wear glasses for nearly
four years which is phenomenal
same thing with increasing bone fats
yeah so
no surgery
when i thought about it after i’d read
about what happens and how the eye works
so just the basics of what happens to
the eye
just generally as we age if we think
about what we do
every day we look at screens a lot don’t
we or if we do look in the distance it’s
really just to the end of the room
we don’t really look very far and so
we’re keeping
our field of motion for our muscles
for our eyes in a very narrow frame
so what would happen it’s a bit like
doing a bicep curl for those who do
exercise in the gym
a bicep curl that only goes this sort of
range you know yeah
like that then you’re never going to
grow
the the muscle so it’s like how can i
grow my muscle how can i allow my muscle
of my eyes
to get its full range of motion again so
that would just be
exercises like you do with a bicep
amazing
well i just added to my gym routine
yeah thank you well
yeah i think there’s uh there’s still so
much to learn i think it’s one of the
it’s one of the things about again going
to mars that i love is
pure the pure discovery and
opportunities there’s gonna be a
thousand things we
you can’t plan to learn them you can
only learn by
doing um but what what’s what what’s the
is there one thing that’s like
that would be is it just being in mars
or is it actually is there something
particular about being on mars
that really really drives you oh there’s
so many
so many things and everything from just
the fun
of weightlessness on the way there and
and
getting on ours when you’ve got a third
of its gravity to then
for me one of the fascinating things is
wow okay
imagine we are living in a completely
closed
loop system for all of our resources for
water for energy for food
everything how would we do it
like nutrients for example if we’re
going to live in a society where we have
to grow all of our own food to survive
and ensure that those plants have the
right nutrients
to grow to then feed us how do we manage
that
cycle and that’s so that’s really
interesting to me and i just did a
i did almost like a pilot uh project for
that last year
i got to go and so here we are
experimentation again um
i went and spent two weeks with the mars
desert research
station in the utah desert so i went
into an isolation
research project there and and that’s
they just
run all these research projects ongoing
and so you can you can apply anyone can
apply
to do a research project there once you
have to be um
i think you need to be a university
agent older and
and then and so mine was i want to go in
and see what happens to
our food waste the food that we waste
when we when we’re eating as a
as a crew because we’re a crew of four
if that’s going to be collected as
compost for our food system
what’s in the compost what are we
actually feeding our plants
if it’s going to be we eat we might be
eating freeze-dried food for many months
until we can grow our first plants so
what’s the waste from the food drive
freeze dried food
is it really salty that would be a
problem
so that’s what my research did i had a
look at that to work out
what’s actually in the waste that’s
going to go into the compost
so that you know highlight the problems
again
yeah so many systems there there’s so
many big problems to be solved it’s um
i think partly you’ve just got to have
the boldness to go
to then have the the courage and the
momentum to try to solve those things
um which is amazing so i know
i know you’re busy um testing all these
things and so i don’t want to keep you
back for a moment um
can you like there’s a lot of young
women who uh
i i think i very positively i hope the
world has changed going a better
direction
we have a lot more work to do uh if
there if there are young girls out there
who are thinking that might want to
study physics or do experimentation or
into science or tech or build robots
like is there you’ve got it there’s a
really couple of big strong messages
here about
feeling a bit of fear but having the
courage to follow the things you’re
interested in
um is there anything else that you think
maybe practically
or or a starting point for for women or
things that made a big difference to you
that you think you could pass on
look it’s actually very simple in some
ways
mick uh i want to share two words with
you and with
the girls that might hear this why not
why not it’s something my mother um used
to
say quite a bit and still does she’s
very
she’s a fascinating woman at the age of
70 my mother decided
i’m going to learn to ride a bicycle i’m
going to buy my first bicycle and ride a
bike at the age of 70 right this is
unreal
some of the girls that listen to this
this will be like their grandmother’s
age or older
so yeah quite blown away your mum said
why not well what’s the worst that can
happen i was thinking you could fall off
however but that’s the i guess that’s
the point
why not if we when we ask the question
why which we do in science you really
you really drill down to try and
understand something deeply right so
the question is but when you then
ask yourself why not that opens up
possibility
sorry to invite the girls that that
listen to this that
might read what you have to write when
they’re thinking about
studying something or exploring a new
idea for themselves
to to get into building robots or just
science or anything at all ask why not
if you can’t think of a really good
reason that’s not just an excuse
you’ve got to do it especially if it
makes you a little bit scared
because then you’re going to have the
most fun doing it it’s going to be so
rewarding
it’s a really really good message i’d
love to also know about
your thoughts on teamwork with mars um
but we might have to leave that to
another time because i think that’s
obviously going to be
critical right you can’t just be
individually brilliant
um all good nearly all good work
requires that good teamwork
really quickly in terms of um things
that you can experiment with like
um you know potatoes or salt or you know
anything that might be water you’re
taking to mars or your eyes
versus working with people like um
do you do you have a preference of one
or the other do you like a mix uh
how do you find them different well the
people part is
critical as well and that’s another
science isn’t it the social sciences and
psychology
and if we can’t communicate well with
each other and don’t understand
our own strengths and weaknesses as the
human being
then how can we make sure that they’re
going to be made up
for by our teammates our colleagues so
putting together a team that culturally
from a
psychological perspective is a good fit
he’s gonna be more important than being
the world’s best
physicist or the world’s best robotics
expert or anything like that
so it’s i actually do some training in
that area too i work with a group called
group relations australia which is
a a group of people who mostly a lot of
them are psychologists counselors
psychiatrists
and the like and so i do some training
with them each year a few times a year
ideally
where i start to unpack what are some of
my biases
do i have a cultural bias do i have a
bias against
different sorts of people or the way
that some people might respond to things
and so i seek to understand myself a bit
more so that i can be
a better person and work better with
lots of other different people
so that diverse community is really
important
that’s amazing well look um thank you so
much there’s so much there to
to keep diving into and keep sharing but
um we
the book is now slated to come out
november 17th so there’s plenty more
for me to learn about mars and all the
work you’re doing between between now
and then
but look thanks for uh both being an
inspiration also um
for your work i’m glad we we got
connected i can’t even remember i think
maybe been through someone tweeting
about um
people women in uh in the space program
in australia so
really wonderfully to be connected and
thank you so much for sharing
um the why not is a is a um i’m actually
married because my wife said why not
um fantastic at
a wedding actually so uh so i’m i’m a
big
me my three kids are big fans of uh bold
women saying why not
and going for it so uh again thank you
so much for sharing really lovely to get
to know you meet you and uh
we can stay in touch um great background
um
and i hope you get to see the earth from
that view on one day
and keep doing what you’re doing so
thank you diane greatly appreciate it
you’re welcome anytime
