Podcast chat with Dr Becky Sage, CEO, Interactive Scientific
What if we could collaborate better over new drug design work?
This transcribe is taken from The Voctech Podcast; Subscribe and listen by searching for “The Edtech Podcast” on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, and Google.
I got the 06:25am train from Plymouth to Bristol this morning, which was a delight, cross-country and very beautiful, and very sunny. I’m now at the Engine Shed. I keep calling it the Engine Rooms, or something else, I’m not sure. But it’s definitely the Engine Shed at Bristol Temple Meads. And I’m delighted to be here with Dr. Becky Sage, CEO of I Scientific, so welcome. Interactive Scientific, as a little introduction I’m going to read a little bit about Interactive Scientific and about Becky, and then we’ll go into our interview today.
Interviewer: So, as via your website and LinkedIn and so on it says, “At Interactive Scientific limited we create immersive digital tools for science research and science education. Our products use the best in digital design and innovative approaches to enable people with challenges in science to solve their problems with computational tools. Our technology Nano Simbox is being used by researchers in drug design, energy, and materials chemistry. Using virtual reality, cloud-based simulation, and web-based management tools to enable and facilitate experimentation, collaboration, and understanding.”
Interviewer: It goes on to say, “I have led the company as we have developed Nano Simbox. Our ultimate goal is to bring the excitement and beauty of science to all, enabling current and future generations of scientific researchers to solve 21st century problems with 21st century tools.” And then finally, “I believe in connecting the full scientific ecosystem to the societal challenges. They’re underpinned by science research and developing a more diverse workforce with the scientific skills, confidence, and intuition to build a healthy sustainable future. We have won a number of awards for innovation, and we have generated approximately £1.5 million GBP to seed the development of the company. I was the winner of the infocus Women in Innovation award, a finalist in the HSBC Forward Ladies award, and finalist in the WISE Women in Science Tech Startups awards. In addition to running the company, I’m a keen gymnast and actress, winning the Adult British Championships in Gymnastics in 2017 and 2018, so welcome, Becky.
Dr. Becky Sage: Hi. Hey, thank you.
Interviewer: That’s quite the intro.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah, that’s a lot of things that we’ve got going on there. Yeah.
Interviewer: Take a moment and take stock that, hang on, you’ve won the British Championship in Gymnastics in 2017, 2018. I think we’ve known each other probably for that long so that sounds like a pretty epic achievement. Could you tell me what that involved, and what that meant to you as well?
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Meant a lot to me. So I should say it’s the Adult British Championships. So don’t get too much of a picture in your head as to how apt I am at gymnastics. But I was a gymnast growing up and when I was about eight or nine I was like, “I really want to go to the Olympics, and I want to be a high level gymnast.” And the reality was that that was not my path. And so I stopped gymnastics when I was in my early 20s and then went back in my 30s and started training. And wanted something to work towards so, started to work towards this British Championships.
Dr. Becky Sage: And I had absolutely no idea of the kind of standards that I was going to be up against, particularly that first year that I went and competed in 2017. And I ended up coming out with the gold, so it was a very proud moment. Yeah.
Interviewer: See, you kind of belittled it a little bit by saying it’s the Adult British, so I suppose what that means is you’re not in the Olympics-
Dr. Becky Sage: I’m not in the elite track, shall we say.
Interviewer: But still, I would say that still sounds very top of the country to some extent.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. For my age.
Interviewer: Yeah. It’s amazing. Did you win any kind of prize money from that, or how did that-
Dr. Becky Sage: No. Just a nice medal which I have framed on my wall. Because it does mean a lot to me.
Interviewer: So some people will be thinking ribbons and bows and all of that and, no.
Dr. Becky Sage: No. In fact if you look up my Instagram, then you can check out some videos on my Instagram. The full piece is artistic gymnastics, floor, vault, beam, and bars. That’s what I compete on.
Interviewer: And are you still training and that?
Dr. Becky Sage: I am. So I actually have three weeks until the 2019 British Championships. So I tell you, the pressure is on a little bit to try and retain my title. But we’ll see.
Interviewer: And do you have a particular piece of music that you work to?
Dr. Becky Sage: I do. Yeah. I have a new piece of music. It’s from Final Fantasy this time around. I was using Feeling Good the last two years. Which is kind of a cool one to dance to, but I wanted something new for this year.
Interviewer: Do you have a favourite gymnast?
Dr. Becky Sage: Oh that’s a really good question. So I really like Aly Raisman, who’s from America. She’s been an Olympian. She’s a retired gymnast now. But she was also very much involved in speaking up for all the gymnasts that went through this big sexual abuse thing that went on. So I kind of admire her from the point of view of her being a gymnast who obviously had to work really hard to get to where she got to, but also from the point of view that she has stood up and advocated for women and girls and their safety within sport as well.
Interviewer: Yeah. So I’ve got here, you’re winning gymnastics trophies and smashing out being a CEO. What made you this person?
Dr. Becky Sage: Wow. What made me this person? So, to get a bit poignant, I did a speech at my grandfather’s funeral a couple of weeks ago. And I described him as disruptive, so there was certainly a streak of, shall we say, innovation and wanting to make a change that came from him. And I think on the flip side of that my parents were both teachers and have both really been advocates of doing things really well and doing things for people and having high expectations from an academic perspective. But also like I said, giving back and giving to people.
Dr. Becky Sage: So I think my upbringing and my family, I have a massive extended family as well, are a big part of me feeling like I just wanted to get out there and achieve and do things that are going to make a difference. But I obviously have a bit of a A-type personality going on as well.
Interviewer: Well I was going to say as well, for anyone who’s struggling with their time management, do you have any tips on fitting in training and-
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah.
Interviewer: CEO-ing?
Dr. Becky Sage: And I kind of flipped it a little bit. Because I think when you are in the role of CEO your job never ends. Your task list could fill however much time that you have. So one of the things I’ve actually been really conscious of is how do I make sure I kind of have a pizza of life, or a wheel of life, with all these different segments in it. And I think by doing that, that makes me a better CEO. Because it means that I can step back.
Dr. Becky Sage: When I go to gymnastics I train a few times a week and a couple of hours when I train, and doing that is the time I switch off. And I think that’s really important. And so I think it isn’t a case of like, “How do I fit all of this stuff in?” It’s a case of saying, “Well, if I didn’t, then would I have my mind healthy enough to be CEO?”
Dr. Becky Sage: Because isn’t it better to make good decisions than to just be doing a lot of work all the time?
Interviewer: And do you feel like that’s something you’ve always worked on, or has that been a relatively recent development? Because for me, I’m 36 now, and I’d say that I probably started to hone in on that in the last year.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. I’m a similar age to you, and it is a relatively recent development. And it’s taken going through waves of really hitting those periods of exhaustion, of stuff that feels like burnout, and realizing that I’m not necessarily doing things with the best perspective. To have stepped back, and having the right supporters around me as well. The right team, the right mentors, the people who actually are not afraid to stand up and say, “Stop doing this.” You know.
Dr. Becky Sage: So, I think that has taken a long time. I was not like that. I was complete opposite. I was like, “You have to just work harder all of the time. If you don’t you’re going to fail.” And actually I think that that’s where anything that I might see as a failure actually came from, as opposed to the parts where I’ve stepped back and looked after myself.
Interviewer: I think I saw Angela McFarlane speak recently on a panel. And I thought she’s amazing because she was talking about the hero narrative of our education system. And you can work really hard and you get your A stars and what you need. Then you go to university, work really hard there. No one tells you that actually if you try and do that for the rest of your life, you will not last it out.
Dr. Becky Sage: Absolutely. And that really sits behind a lot of my motivation for what we do at iSci. Because I came out of a Ph.D. in Chemistry and suddenly was like, “Well, now what?” And the whole thing I was used to doing which was proving how intelligent I was, that didn’t fly in the working world. And also thinking, “I don’t even want to say anything unless I think it’s 100% right.” Or seeing everything as black and white. And that’s really not the world we live in. We live in something that’s full of subtleties and gray areas.
Dr. Becky Sage: So a lot of how I would like to approach science learning, science training, is to realize that it’s not about that knowledge retention and just super overachieving. It’s actually what are the goals we need to solve, and how are we going to do that together?
Interviewer: Well actually it’s funny, because I’ve put here, so another part that I was reading yesterday. So, “iSci is an opportunity for me to create change.” So change is important to you. “Change in the way we do science education, change in scientific research environments, and change in the way science is communicated and explored by everyone.”
Interviewer: So my question being, what’s the biggest change you’ve been able to effect or that you have experienced.
Dr. Becky Sage: Wow, that’s a really good question. What’s the biggest change that I’ve been able to effect? I think that I am experiencing change, and so I’m going to, yes. I’ll try and think of an answer to the first part of that question because that’s hard.
Interviewer: It’s okay. We can-
Dr. Becky Sage: But yeah.
Interviewer: Or we can come back to it. [crosstalk 00:10:00]
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. It might pop in. But to the second of the question, like seeing change that’s been effected or that is starting to effect me, is to do with gender equality and what it is to be a woman leading a business. Especially in the startup world actually, because you are so reliant on other people buying into what you do.
Interviewer: And there’s a terrible record of VCs investing in female founders.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And you can see why when you go in and people, it’s even the kind of analogies that you might use, and the experiences you draw from. The shared experiences. They’re just not there for me often. So you walk into a room and feel like you’re talking to people who are so different from you that you, you know.
Dr. Becky Sage: And part of it actually comes back to that super overachiever, because you walk in and you’re trying to impress these people, and actually what you really want is a conversation with people. And so you kind of need to feel that there’s some degree of comfort within a group that you’re presenting to on the VC side.
Dr. Becky Sage: So you mentioned in the intro I was one of the winners of the Innovate Women in Innovation Awards and that was two years ago now, 2017. Nearly three years ago actually, when I found out that I’d been one of those winners. And that was the first time that I came into a room with a peer group that was predominantly female.
Dr. Becky Sage: And I say predominantly female. I mean more than just two of us in a room of like 15, 20, whatever.
Interviewer: Kind of a novelty. Yeah.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Exactly. And so what was really interesting about that was the story that came up over and over again with that peer group was, “Yep, when I was early on in my career in science or technology or some kind of innovative area, I had to switch off who I was.” And that’s very much what I felt like. When I was doing my Ph.D., when I was early on in my career, I couldn’t be me. And I’ve had situations even more recently where I was very much shot down for showing my personality, and had people try to use that kind of as a flaw.
Dr. Becky Sage: So the major change that I’m seeing is that there are shifts going on. Especially like I said, as things to do with inclusion. And I am experiencing something that is feeling more included. What I don’t know is if that’s to do with my working trajectory and the fact that my profile is raised and you start to build up some of these accolades a little bit. Or you get known by people and then you are treated in a slightly better way than you would have been previously.
Dr. Becky Sage: But that’s definitely a change I’ve seen, and I think as a whole in society there’s definitely much more dialogue going on around it.
Interviewer: Yeah I think maybe some people that would previously have just kind of talked without thinking are starting to think, “Oh, what will the repercussions of that be if I carry on in that way.”
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah.
Interviewer: I was having a conversation with a lady just last week who pointed out some of the well-known edtech unicorns out there are actually female-led. But how often do we talk about that? VIPKid et cetera, et cetera. And there’s a disparity in perhaps how that’s-
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. I’ve observed that as well, and I wonder. There’s definitely been times when I felt a bit more comfortable in, because we’re across education and enterprise within science. And so I definitely have had times when I feel more comfortable in the education space.
Dr. Becky Sage: And I think that that’s partly because of that.
Interviewer: And I always think it’s dangerous when we’re sort of saying, give us equality in the sense of we want to work in the way that men work. So I think it’s totally different. I mean I was looking at the skills gap on the train on the way here and reading about that. And I’ve been invited to speak at the Barbican Battle of Ideas thing.
Interviewer: But I was thinking about AI and education. You know, we talk about the skills gap, but we’ve got this huge untapped potential of the female workforce. Which if you just slightly change the way people work, there’s a huge potential there.
Dr. Becky Sage: Absolutely. And I think that that’s where, for Interactive Scientific being a female-led business, we talk a lot about collaboration and communication, and how can we use tools that drive collaboration and communication as opposed to kind of an individual who is excelling in a certain thing. And of course industry is built into that. But the processes don’t actually work in that way a lot of the time.
Interviewer: And thinking about corporate training as well. So if female leadership doesn’t include that digital skills piece, then that gap will extend as well.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Absolutely. And like you said, especially when we’re starting to talk about AI and machine learning. I mean we all know that if you’ve only got one small subset of people who are-
Interviewer: Developing.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah, developing the algorithms or feeding the algorithms, then you’re going to end up with an extremely biased system. It’s going to polarize these effects rather than the other way around.
Interviewer: Case point being that one of the best used skills for Alexa is fart noises. I mean I just think when they … anyway.
Interviewer: You graduated with a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2008.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yep.
Interviewer: What is a chemistry fact every listener should know about?
Dr. Becky Sage: 2008 was a long time ago. Chemistry fact. So I think … Oh I know. Okay. So a really common misconception, or something that people don’t really realize or certainly don’t think about, is the fact that molecules move. That just very much sits in chemistry. That we think of chemicals and chemistry as a very man-made thing, but actually chemistry sits behind everything we do. We’re made of chemicals. It’s actually atoms, molecules, that is what all of nature is built of. And they are these amazing dynamic particles that are responsible for our lives.
Interviewer: Well I think this is really fascinating because we like to think that we are kind of self-determined individuals. And then there’s this idea of the selfish gene. And now there’s the idea that actually, before that idea that you think you’ve come up with, probably you’re driven by hormones and by molecular changes and all of this.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. All I would say is that I think that there is, what any great scientist knows, and I’m certainly not putting myself in that category, is that there is so much more unknown than there is known. So whilst there are all these scientific laws and they are followed, but a lot of that is also built on probabilities and the fact that things are acting as a whole system.
Dr. Becky Sage: So there is so much space for things that we still don’t know, and probably in none of our lifetimes we’re ever going to know. So I think that for me as somebody who thinks about things in quite an analytical fashion and likes to have a lot of evidence, and is certainly respectful of the scientific process and scientific evidence. I also think there’s space for us to observe and experience so many more things than can just be explained by the science we know right now.
Dr. Becky Sage: So I think the reality is we exist in gray areas.
Interviewer: When I think going back to gymnastics, [inaudible 00:17:00] and at Interactive Scientific is this idea, previously we’d think of body and mind completely separately. And actually they do inform one another, and nourishing your body is just as important to come up with those good ideas as well.
Dr. Becky Sage: Absolutely. Yeah, I can remember way back, I used to work at the Royal Society of Chemistry and some of us played squash before work. Or you know, going out and doing walking meetings or whatever it might be. And how you are on that, just everything is different when you’re focusing on something that’s a bit more physical than really kind of getting your head into that mental space. And I’ve never been good at thinking through a problem. I kind of have to do some kind of action. And if that doesn’t work then I hae to go away and let the ideas come to me.
Interviewer: It sort of filters down.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And I was actually talking to someone who works in the careers at Oxford University, and he sent me this article all about the depth of our subconscious, and how important it is to understand that these things that we can very obviously, cognitively think through are not necessarily where most of the work is going on. Most of it’s going on in our subconscious in all these millions of bits of data that we’re receiving all the time. And that’s where our good ideas are going to come from if we allow them to come through. Yeah.
Interviewer: So we will get onto corp training, but I’m enjoying all these other questions as well.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. This is good.
Interviewer: What was your Ph.D. about?
Dr. Becky Sage: So the title of my Ph.D. was Mass Spectrometric Analysis of Laser Ablation Plumes.
Interviewer: And I’ve got here, what the hell is laser ablation?
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Laser ablation is actually a really simple concept. You fire a laser at something that’s solid, and then a whole bunch of material flies off really fast and with a lot of energy. So that’s basically what I did.
Interviewer: That’s really exciting.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah.
Interviewer: So how is that used in the, not in the real world-
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah, so there’s a couple of aspects. And again, the science has probably progressed a lot since this, and I don’t think this is really the application of it anymore. But kind of think film deposition. So if you’re thinking about building chips or layers of things where you need really thin films, diamond coatings, those kind of things. So what you do is you fire that laser. The material flies off very very quickly. And then you put some kind of what’s called a substrate in front of that so you’re kind of catching the atoms, but they just form this really thin film on top of things.
Dr. Becky Sage: And then you can do all sorts of things to make that work for electronics and various other things.
Dr. Becky Sage: And then the other aspect is, when you fire that laser and you’ve got material flying off, you’re creating all sorts of very high-energy particles. So you can kind of model the way things work. For example as a meteor is entering the atmosphere, or something like that, or kind of space particles.
Interviewer: So you could help predict if we’re going to die from [crosstalk 00:19:49]
Dr. Becky Sage: Well, I don’t-
Interviewer: If we extend it a little bit.
Dr. Becky Sage: I mean I think if I could have done anything as useful as that, then now I might have carried on in academia a little bit longer than I did. But yeah, it was definitely an area that I’m happy to have left in my past shall we say. That’s being that specific.
Interviewer: Yes. I was speaking to someone recently who’s come from research. Actually it was the chap at the NHS. If you’re listening, Richard Price. He works out the strategy for the NHS for learning and development. Previously he was doing the same task in a lab. After a while it just drove him a bit nuts.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah.
Interviewer: You know in the long tale that can add to a great discovery, but you have to be so patient.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And I do think that different people enjoy different things. So I think that’s part of it. Some people are just really happy to be in those kind of roles. I think the thing that would have helped me more, what would have driven me to stay on more of a research path, whereas I came out and I’ve very much been in management and communication of science ever since, would have been really understanding the context more, and finding the passion around the context of the science that you’re doing. So I think, certainly for somebody like me, I would have really needed to have connected, how does this have a major impact as we move forward?
Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah. Does anyone know I’m in here?
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Well, and it is a little bit like that.
Interviewer: Bit lonely.
Dr. Becky Sage: And I think I found it quite an isolating time. And again, in my case, I definitely had a lot of people who were part of the group who are also quite introverted and focused on their own experiments and their own work. So I think you do very much feel that you’re on your own a lot in those environments. And I didn’t really like that.
Interviewer: How did you come to be the CEO of Interactive Scientific?
Dr. Becky Sage: So after I finished my Ph.D. I did a whole bunch of different things. I worked for the Innovation Team at the Regional Development Agency, and that was the first time that I had really thought about what innovation meant. We also did what are now the Smart Awards at Innovate. They were delivered out of the Regional Development Agency.
Dr. Becky Sage: So the teams that I worked with were funding innovative companies, and I think that that really exposed me to the idea of, R&D can be used in a very applications and user-focused way. And so that started to kind of light a bit of a thing that I wanted to do something a bit more entrepreneurial.
Dr. Becky Sage: I then worked for the Royal Society of Chemistry. And again, my role was really broad. So lots of stuff that I carry right now around the ecosystem working together, about the fact that science education and science enterprise, whilst at the moment are relatively separate things, I really want to bring those things together.
Dr. Becky Sage: And I think that, because my role at the Royal Society focused on education, on policy, on working with academics, on working with industry, on working on global challenges and how together we’re going to solve some of the global challenges that chemistry sits underneath. And you can see that that still comes out through the work I’m doing now.
Dr. Becky Sage: So kind of all of that was very much learning and exposing myself to different ways of looking at science. And then after that I wanted to have something that was a bit more portfolio-focused. Because I’d found that I had not been able to do some of the creative things that I wanted to do, and I was working really hard but it was on somebody else’s agenda. And I kind of didn’t want to. If I was going to work really really hard I wanted to do it for things that I could actually effect a change in.
Dr. Becky Sage: So I did some part time work with different startup companies, and some organizations that work with startups as well. So I had all this kind of portfolio type stuff. I worked in theater for a while too, just to get some creative stuff.
Interviewer: I saw that. And had some time out in …
Dr. Becky Sage: In LA.
Interviewer: In LA, yeah. What was the weirdest thing you saw in LA?
Dr. Becky Sage: Oh, I don’t know if I can say it on here. Is it like PG-13?
Interviewer: No it’s not. Swearing and talk of profanities and all of that.
Dr. Becky Sage: Okay.
Interviewer: Sounds like a good story really.
Dr. Becky Sage: Actually no, in fact this waws in San Francisco, which is when we were walking through the Mission at about midnight, and-
Interviewer: I feel like there’s going to be transvestites involved. This is jus because my first trip, when I was 17, 18, I did a gap year. So we finished in northern Sabah and then went over to Kuala Lumpur, which is the first time I went to a city in Malaysia. And in this hostel. And then all of a sudden I found myself hanging out with transvestites in Kuala Lumpur.
Dr. Becky Sage: Well I mean there definitely were some in the Mission. But the thing I saw was somebody on their own pleasuring themselves on the street. So that was interesting.
Dr. Becky Sage: I think in LA it was actually a bit terrifying. I fainted later this day. Of course one of the problems in America is the fact that a lot of people with mental health problems end up on the street. And it’s getting really serious now.
Interviewer: It is really, really, like San Francisco and Vancouver-
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And it’s in your face.
Interviewer: No welfare to live in the same way.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And you can just see it. And I was just walking down the street and some lady walked up to me right in my face and just screamed in my face, “I know what you’ve done! You’re not going to get away with it!”
Interviewer: Which is everyone’s worst nightmare.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah.
Interviewer: Imposter syndrome writ large.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And then like I said later that day I actually passed out. So I don’t know if it was to do with that or not. Which isn’t a thing I normally do.
Interviewer: Yeah. Fairly intense place I would imagine.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Yeah. But also it was a bit of a respite for me because I went there to do actor training. And so every day I just had to get up and go and I’d do dance lessons and singing lessons and acting lessons.
Interviewer: Were you doing lots of auditions as well or [crosstalk 00:25:31] just sort of training?
Dr. Becky Sage: No, not at that point. Because, you know, I didn’t have any kind of visa to be able to work there. So it was literally just time training with other people who were also doing that.
Interviewer: You’re a true lifelong learner [crosstalk 00:25:44] yeah.
Dr. Becky Sage: I very much am. Yeah. And I think we all have to be now, don’t we? And I think that’s why we’re kind of really pushing for lifelong learning.
Interviewer: But all these things, all these skills go round. My husband used to be, when he was a student, a tour guide on the buses in Bath.
Dr. Becky Sage: One of my friends just got a job doing something similar.
Interviewer: Having to stand up in front of tons of international tourists when you’re wildly hungover and basically entertain people. And retain information, present it in a way. And he’s a great public speaker as a result.
Dr. Becky Sage: So the acting has definitely made it so that I am very comfortable onstage. The thing that’s interesting in a business context is I still get incredibly nervous if I’m not happy with the story. And I guess that’s the thing. So I have the real benefit of not being nervous just about standing up in front of people. I can get rid of that bit. Like I said, then it’s about making sure I’m telling the right story and spending my time worrying about that part of it.
Dr. Becky Sage: Of course you have doubts when you’re running a business and hoping that they don’t come to the surface too much at the wrong time. So that’s the kind of thing.
Interviewer: Yeah, being able to compartmentalize that is quite a skill I think.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And to really tell a good story. Because you have to write the story now. And so I’m no longer just performing somebody else’s words. I have to perform my own words and then I have to trust in my own words. And so that’s the more challenging bit for me now.
Interviewer: I saw you sort of were part of the project team behind TEDx.
Dr. Becky Sage: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Interviewer: And there’s an amazing amount of entrepreneurs that seem to have at some point had a [crosstalk 00:27:24]. I always think of Tim Ferriss as well in the podcast world. That’s how he sort of started out, got to know a lot of these people and then. Yeah.
Dr. Becky Sage: And it was interesting because events had always been a part of the jobs. In fact even when I was doing my Ph.D. I used to do things to get out of the lab if I could. And so I would run [inaudible 00:27:40]. I would run, you know, when you’re giving tours, outreach events, and stuff like that. I was always part of those things. So events was always a big thing for me as I moved through my career.
Dr. Becky Sage: And I think it still is now. Because I think it comes back to collaboration and sharing, and I think those things are important. And TEDx just came at the perfect time for me. Like I said, that was when I’d come back to Bristol and I was working in these kind of portfolio roles. And it was just such an opportunity to meet so many different people and see things from a difficult perspective.
Dr. Becky Sage: And I still have one of my closest friends, who’s also my nextdoor neighbor, we met through TEDx. I think just getting exposed to things through a different angle. And I think that sciences in particular have often been very traditional. A lot of people who work in science industries have come through very traditional paths. There hasn’t been a huge amount of deviation from that. So it’s their personal lives and their hobbies that kind of play into what they bring through something that’s a bit more creative.
Dr. Becky Sage: And I think that one of the benefits that I have is, because of all those things I’ve done that have been about seeing things through different eyes, you can start to apply that to an industry that’s a little bit more traditional. So I think that’s quite exciting.
Interviewer: Yeah, absolutely. And so where did we get to on the journey to CEO of iSci?
Dr. Becky Sage: Oh that’s true, I didn’t even get there. Yeah, I like to chill a lot.
Dr. Becky Sage: So yeah, when I was working through all of these different projects I’d actually, through TEDx Bristol, had met with the founders of iSci. And I should say that iSci was founded about a year before I started working for it. And that was because it got an Arts Council grant to do a project called Dance Room Spectroscopy and a dance talk called Hidden Fields. And so that was a tour that went around the world, and it was about kind of a basic version of some of the things we do now, but using physics simulations to create artistic effects, and then having dancers interact with those effects.
Dr. Becky Sage: So it was this amazing visual, artistic experience.
Interviewer: I think I may have experienced a version of this [crosstalk 00:29:55].
Dr. Becky Sage: You did. Yeah. You experienced a later version because we then brought it back to life at We The Curious, which is the science museum here in Bristol. Again, it was really cool because we were able to put an installation inside this kind of black box. And people could go in. And then we’d actually updated it a bit for that so that users could do things like turn up the temperature and then see the particles flying around more quickly, and they could change the visualization. We have scenes in that.
Dr. Becky Sage: So this was a project that was happening. I already knew the team prior to the establishment of iSci. But like I said, I wasn’t there for that first year. And they came back from the tour, and I was talking to the founders about it. And it was all going to dissipate. One person was going off to America because he was taking a fellowship over at Stanford. And then one person was a dancer who’d been part of the founding teams. So they were kind of doing lots of other dance and choreography projects. And one person was the technical person. He just liked to work on different projects.
Dr. Becky Sage: So it was all kind of, okay this was nice. You know, is there anything else? And I swooped in and went, “Well there’s some interesting data from when you’ve had young people in particular in here, that show that by making it more visual, more interactive, people are asking very different questions about the science behind something. And is there a way we can package this up so it becomes some kind of tool or experience that can be scalable?”
Dr. Becky Sage: Because it definitely at that point was kind of this big theater experience. It wasn’t something that could ever pay for itself or really scale in any way. So that was when I came in and one of my first jobs was to write an Innovate Grant. Which was an SPRI project, so it was 100% funded. And we got that grant. And then we got some follow on grant as well through that. So the founders kind of came together and went, “You’re doing a lot of the directing of this company. Do you want to be a director? And you’re kind of being managing director right now so do you want to be managing director?”
Dr. Becky Sage: And so I said yes, and then kind of had a few terms around my goals for the next couple of years and the targets around that.
Interviewer: Very cool.
Dr. Becky Sage: So it really happened in a step-by-step way.
Interviewer: And I think since we’ve known each other, I’ve been familiar with your work with Nano Simbox. And probably more so the schools-facing content and development on that side. What’s next for iSci in say the next six months, and also thinking of this series in terms of the corporate training with relation to industry as well?
Dr. Becky Sage: I should say we’re doing a bit of a brand refresh. So Nano Simbox will be no more [crosstalk 00:32:37] as a brand. It will actually be called iSci Learn. And iSci Learn is all built on a molecular visualization platform. So we visualize molecules in an interactive way. We put that into virtual reality and that got a lot of interest from the research community. Especially because we did a collaboration with Oracle and the University of Bristol that showed that by putting these molecular interactions into virtual reality, we could do certain things 12 times faster than we’d be able to do them in a virtual experience that was on a 2D screen.
Dr. Becky Sage: So we started to get a lot of interest from the research community who were interested in having this 3D visualizer that they could interact with and use that to help them to better understand how, for example, a drug and a protein fit together.
Dr. Becky Sage: So that was an important turning point for us. Because on the educational side of things, being just a science tool, and I say just in the context of, we are not something that people are going to purchase school-wide. So we have to think really carefully about what our business models are and how we’re actually going to feasibly have a sustainable business model.
Dr. Becky Sage: We also have a goal around inclusion. So we wanted our education work to be as available and as free as possible to as many people as possible. So getting uptake from the R&D teams, and initially that was in universities but then it started to move more into an enterprise space, means that we can think more about working in enterprise from a kind of revenue generation side of things. And that allows those enterprises to both kind of feed back in from a financial perspective to what we do, which we can kind of drip into some of the education work.
Dr. Becky Sage: But it also means we’re starting to tie together what’s going on in research and what’s going on in education. So there’s also opportunities for people in the corporate sector to be able to communicate, visualize the molecules they’re using, communicate around concepts that are really important to them.
Dr. Becky Sage: So the reason I brought up the rebranding is this idea that it’s all one molecular visualization platform. And actually we’re going to be upgrading that into kind of a molecular innovation platform so that it can enable people to collaborate and communicate as well.
Dr. Becky Sage: But those terms I’ve just used, collaboration, communication, that’s what learning is all based upon. So we take this single platform and have a number of different end uses for it. And for us we really know, based on the work we’ve already done in education, that we can very quickly increase understanding of concepts.
Dr. Becky Sage: And one of the really important factors in terms of our next step is that corporate science enterprises are predicted to be spending 100 billion in the next 10 years on digitizing their work. So moving much more into these digital tools. That means there’s a huge training gap in theory. If they’re going to be spending all this money and moving towards what’s called a digital-first approach then they are also going to need to train people very very quickly.
Dr. Becky Sage: And for me the vision around that is actually creating tools that can do both at the same time, that can do R&D and situational training all at once. You know, we’re all very used to this with our mobiles, with the digital tools we use on a personal basis. We learn them very quickly because we have to. And that’s ultimately where I want the corporate training to go is let’s consolidate these two things together. Let’s use digital tools to both kind of predict how molecules and different scientific process are going to happen, but also use it as a way to learn very quickly.
Interviewer: It’s almost like your technical specialists might use it to come up with new, I don’t know if compounds is the right phrase. Going back to my science GSCE. [crosstalk 00:36:30] But also to train the non-technical specialists about what their work is in essentially.
Dr. Becky Sage: Exactly. So I kind of describe the vision which is very much kind of that, in the future, being able to do that all in one really. And having these tools that can communicate as well as do the research and development. But the interim steps are that we already know that our tools can be used to train. We know that they increase understanding. They increase speed to understanding actually. The speed to competencies is something that’s really important.
Dr. Becky Sage: So in the interim we are looking to work with people in the corporate sector to provide training around, it might be the certain compounds they’re working with. Sales teams for example need to understand the science behind what it is they’re selling. And so we know we can do that very quickly with the tools that we’ve developed. And we’ve also built things in a very modular way, so we can be quite bespoke about that as well.
Dr. Becky Sage: So we can very easily say it’s a platform technology. It’s not just another piece of content, another piece of content.
Interviewer: And do you see any threat with technologies like AI in terms of taking out the manual process of tinkering with these things, or do you think it will coincide-
Dr. Becky Sage: So coming back to our conversation earlier about, as we move more to automated processes, and perhaps by having different people with a more diverse background thinking about how that actually plays out, I think one of the things that I am very passionate about is making sure that we have doorways into that data or those processes if we are going to automate a lot of things.
Dr. Becky Sage: And AI certainly is going to play a role. We need to make sure we can validate that information.
Interviewer: And so it plays a role in terms of the visual transparency of what’s going on as well.
Dr. Becky Sage: Exactly. Yeah.
Interviewer: That’s really interesting.
Dr. Becky Sage: And so it’s opening that door to the kind of-
Interviewer: And you’re going to be like, “Oh God, the AI’s gone mad. Look what it’s created. It’s created a monster.”
Dr. Becky Sage: Exactly. I know. I don’t know if I’m just some kind of catastrophizer, if that’s the right word.
Interviewer: I think that’s really interesting though.
Dr. Becky Sage: You know, I think it’s important. AI is so sexy right now, and certainly we could have a strategy that focuses more around machine learning and AI instead of visualization, collaboration, communication. However if we were to do that, we would be ignoring this thing that I’m really passionate about, which is we need to make sure we have checks and balances. AI is pushed so hard, and investors will invest in AI and machine learning. And I think that that kind of little missing piece needs to be, how do we make sure that we can check in with those things?
Interviewer: Oh yeah. 100%. What are buckminsterfullerene molecules?
Dr. Becky Sage: A buckminsterfullerene is C60. So there are 60 carbon atoms all joined together in what looks like a football. There’s all sorts of things that are postulated in terms of how they could be used. They’re little particles that are found in space and sometimes in industrial processes. But they’re kind of cages. So there’s this idea that you could potentially put things inside the cage and then open it up.
Dr. Becky Sage: So again, coming back to that idea of drugs and how they work, if you could put some kind of active agent inside this little cage and then it doesn’t open up until it’s gone through your system … Some weird drug delivery.
Interviewer: Okay. I like that it’s very-
Dr. Becky Sage: But those things are all very much pie-in-the-sky. But that’s what C60 is. On learn.nanosimbox.io you can go in and have a look at C60.
Interviewer: Okay, that’s what I was looking at [crosstalk 00:40:19].
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah, having a little play.
Interviewer: And then in terms of going back to industry, you mentioned [inaudible 00:40:25] before, have you got any other kind of active partners or people that you’re thinking about working with to-
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. So most of the people are people I can’t necessarily name names. But there’s different tiers we’re talking to. So there’s the tier one scientific corporate. So a lot of them are in the pharmaceutical industry or fast-moving consumer goods. So things like P&G or Unilever. Not that those are necessarily the specific ones.
Dr. Becky Sage: So working with kind of a cross-section. So we’re working with the R&D team, the innovation teams, and then somebody at the executive level. Because what we’re talking about is things we don’t want to just be a 10% better. We want to make transformation. So in those cases, so pharmaceutical, it’s about accelerating that drug discovery process but making sure we have these doorways like I’ve already described. So people being able to look in and understand them quickly.
Dr. Becky Sage: I should say that the training aspects of things are really things that we’re only just exploring as part of the Ray Barnes Project that we’ve won through UFI. So that side of it in the corporates is relatively early stages still.
Interviewer: And will you sort of triangulate that with R&D departments at universities or further [crosstalk 00:41:40] education colleges, where they’re perhaps [crosstalk 00:41:43]-
Dr. Becky Sage: Yes. Well, part of the value of having a platform technology is that you can bring these different aspects together when it’s appropriate to that user group. So in particular we’ve done a number of case studies with universities, both in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, and in R&D. And I think universities are a very natural space where R&D and education comes together. But we don’t see that more broadly. Or if you do it’s very much through that university track, and it’s quite an elite narrow track.
Dr. Becky Sage: And so we’re actually-
Interviewer: I was just thinking because you mentioned Bristol before. So I met David Langley who’s now [crosstalk 00:42:27] and I guess they’re trying to broaden that or connect it to industry a little bit. Because it’s a small project in a big [crosstalk 00:42:34].
Dr. Becky Sage: Certainly. And I know University of Bristol have definitely been working on, since the new Vice Chancellor has come in, one of his big passions was around creating these courses that are innovation with certain degrees. And David Langley’s been working on that. So that’s the idea of doing innovation with chemistry and innovation with whatever. I think history, I heard somebody was doing. [crosstalk 00:42:57] And so that’s quite an interesting one.
Dr. Becky Sage: I heard talk as well, I think this is the case, that they’re doing a kind of computer science with, you know-
Interviewer: Ethics.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Oh, that’s interesting.
Interviewer: [crosstalk 00:43:08] I didn’t realize they’re doing it across other subjects as well.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah, and like I said I don’t really know the full scope of it. But I do hope that in some ways we’ll be involved as we move forward, because it’s good to have those close links with the local universities as well as the ones that are a little bit further afield.
Dr. Becky Sage: But yeah, the idea of work, of trying to create that link between education and the corporate sector is something that is important to us. And we’d been working with some FE colleges and one of the overriding things that’s coming out of a lot of the things that I’ve been looking at at the moment is just the lack of accessibility of knowledge about how industry works. And this is actually in universities as well as school and colleges. But people find it’s incredibly hard to get work experience. I know something that the Royal Society of Chemistry are looking at as well is how do you get work experience.
Dr. Becky Sage: We get so many requests because we’re a tiny company. We can’t take that many people on.
Interviewer: This is interesting because I think this goes back to productivity doesn’t it? Everyone’s obsessed about productivity for obvious reasons. So it’s like, well this is going to slow me down. But then it needs to have both.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And there is a real challenge in science that there is very little transparency about what the actually jobs involve. And so if you’re going to go down a science path, certainly in the past and as it is now, you often have to have made decisions when you’re 14 or 15 years old. And actually they say that you’ve already decided whether your science-y or not by the time you’re about eight. Crazy really.
Dr. Becky Sage: So if we could allow people to have more exposure and get more hands on and understand better what goes on behind those closed doors that is a research lab, then we can start to kind of create more of a pipeline.
Interviewer: Are you going to send iSci Learn to the academic [inaudible 00:45:06]. Do you remember that whole [crosstalk 00:45:07]?
Dr. Becky Sage: Oh yeah.
Interviewer: I think you need to.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Yeah. Good idea.
Interviewer: That’s a great example of slightly challenged science culture.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Exactly. And I think we kind of need to break down some of these doors. And actually we talk about productivity, but I think I prefer to talk about effectiveness. Because, especially when you think about it on a team-by-team basis, for example if somebody’s doing drug discovery often that’s an individual person’s work, and that’s just that individual being more productive, or that line of something being more productive, doesn’t necessarily play into the overall effectiveness. And that’s why we’re really championing communication and collaboration.
Dr. Becky Sage: Because it’s those things ultimately, and the sorts of transformations and shifts that they can provide, that are going to take us to a place where we really can tackle some of the problem like healthcare problems or climate change.
Interviewer: Going back to collaboration, I was at the same panel that I mentioned before. But the CEO of Digital Promise. And he was talking about at school and university, you’re predominantly measured on your individual effort. But he would not recruit someone if he thought that they had an issue with teamwork and collaboration. But at university, some forms of collaboration are deemed plagiarism.
Interviewer: And at the same time I know someone that worked within a university said that students don’t really like group work because they’re obsessed with getting their grades, because they know that’s the currency in the industry.
Dr. Becky Sage: Absolutely.
Interviewer: So it’s very difficult.
Dr. Becky Sage: And there is, certainly I see it in the people we bring through. People who are in more of the creative industries, and this is why I think for me having a period of time when I worked in the theater, that’s such a collaborative process from the beginning. And you kind of realize that you sacrifice your own individual productivity for the greater good so to speak.
Interviewer: But it’s something that started off big and then coming in, isn’t it?
Dr. Becky Sage: Exactly. I actually gave a talk at Badminton School, which is an incredibly good, very nice school here in Bristol. And I should say that the girls and young women that I was talking to there were a lot more aware of the world than I am, I’m sure.
Dr. Becky Sage: So I was giving a talk about innovation. And one of the themes that I was bringing up, and they actually articulated way better than me, was the idea of being an individual that is part of the group. So it’s like, how can I as an individual work to thrive but recognize that I am part of something that is bigger, and that sometimes my job might be about making other people more effective, not just about making myself more effective. So I think that these are the kind of skillsets that are really important and that are lacking at the moment. And we really need to find ways of breaking some of those things down.
Interviewer: Love it. What are you reading at the moment and why?
Dr. Becky Sage: Oh. I got a few on the go. I actually just finished reading, is it called Transcription? I literally finished reading it yesterday. That’s a fiction book. And I always have a fiction book on the go. Partly the same reason as I do gymnastics. I like to step away. And I have been reading Blitzscaling, which is just a bit frustrating essentially, for a startup. So that’s Reid Hoffman talking about if you throw lots and lots of money at stuff and get lots and lots of people using it very very quickly, then you might have a chance at actually making that business a success.
Interviewer: [crosstalk 00:48:47] X Prize approach to consolidating everything [crosstalk 00:48:50]
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And so I think I can see from the point of view of somebody who’s been a serial founder and has lots of money and is investing back into it that that might be their perspective. It’s-
Interviewer: You need to write the antidote to that book.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. I mean I totally buy into everything they’re saying. It’s just I don’t have however many [crosstalk 00:49:07]. Yeah. Yeah, somebody just throw 40 million or something this way, then we’ll go for it.
Dr. Becky Sage: So yeah, that’s quite interesting. And I also have Solve for Happy.
Interviewer: Oh yes, that’s Mo Gawdat, is it?
Dr. Becky Sage: Yes. So I’ve just started reading that book as well. [crosstalk 00:49:27] Yeah. And I think to just come full circle back to some of the themes we were talking about at the beginning, I think life is always going to throw us all sorts of different challenges and you can kind of look through all sorts of different eyes as to how you step through those things.
Interviewer: I loved his very simple message which is, stop trying to add things to make yourself happy. Start taking things away. Which is really useful.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. I really buy into that. I was certainly something in the company where we’ve worked very hard to simplify things. And that’s given us a new zest for what we’re doing, and a bit of a fresh approach, a bit of a rebirth. So yeah, definitely believe in that.
Interviewer: Final question. Being a buddy at the Terrence Higgins Trust for 13 years, what has that meant to you and the people you support?
Dr. Becky Sage: Yes. So it’s interesting because in a role as a buddy at the Terrence Higgins Trust, and I actually don’t really do very much anymore. But you support a single person in a very intense way. In a very one-to-one way. So it’s not lots of different people and those kind of things. You really are working and building a relationship with an individual who has been diagnosed with HIV.
Dr. Becky Sage: And the person I worked with, she was very recently diagnosed when I first started working with her.
Dr. Becky Sage: I started doing it when I was doing my Ph.D. and again, it sort of plays on some of the themes we’ve already talked about. That idea of looking at my life and saying, what’s in it, and what’s of interest to me? And I wanted to find a way of giving back. You know, like I was so consumed with my own challenges around doing a Ph.D. or a job, whatever it might be. And it was like, I kind of want to find a way to-
Interviewer: There’s got to be something else as well.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Becky Sage: I did my work experience in a science lab. And I had said when I came out of that work experience at 16, “Oh, I want to find a cure for HIV.” And my godfather who is a scientist, a research scientist working in those kind of areas, said, “Yeah, you might be the right sort of timing.” And I guess so, it was very much when I was growing up something that was in the news a lot.
Interviewer: Well I guess we grew up with that big AIDS campaign.
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Huge stigma. And then-
Interviewer: The grave, like, …
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. And it just seemed like this big scary thing. And then I met somebody who worked for the Terrence Higgins Trust, and she was a bit of a mentor at the time. And I really respected her and her approaches, and she was a very rounded person. And so I went in and did the training and you do intensive training, because obviously there’s so many facets involved. There’s the biological side of things, drugs, and how this disease effects people’s body. There’s a stigma. The mental health. And so it’s such a challenging thing for somebody to be faced with, especially when they’re first diagnosed.
Dr. Becky Sage: I was very thankful that the Terrence Higgins Trust put on this amazing training that like I said was many, many hours over quite a large period of time. So that when I was able to work with somebody I could actually support them. And I think just knowing that that person has somebody who is outside of their day-to-day life. That’s the most important thing. And that’s what I hope I brought, was a different perspective. And what she used to say was, “It’s nice because I can relax, because I know you known everything. It’s fine and I don’t have to pretend to be something that I’m not, and I can just, you know.”
Interviewer: You don’t have to repeat your story over and over again [crosstalk 00:53:13].
Dr. Becky Sage: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And like you said, when do you bring something like that up? It’s not really anybody else’s business, until it is, and so yeah. I think it was and continues to be a really important thing that, like I said, unfortunately when you’re a CEO certain things drop. And also with that buddying system, you’re only meant to be with a certain person for a certain amount of time.
Dr. Becky Sage: But actually it’s come up a lot recently. So I’m thinking of tapping back in. But yeah. It’s really important.
Interviewer: Amazing. Well, if people are listening and they would like to find out more about what you do or contact you, how do they go about doing that?
Dr. Becky Sage: You can find me on Twitter at becky_sage. You can just get in touch there, or interactivescientific.com, there’s a contact form on there so you can get in touch with us. But yeah, tweeting me is probably the [inaudible 00:54:12] more responsive on Twitter than I am anywhere else probably.
Interviewer: That’s good for me [crosstalk 00:54:17]. Well thank you so much Becky.
Dr. Becky Sage: Great. Thank you.
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