Interview with Isabelle Kingsley

Isabelle Kingsley has spent the past four years as a researcher at the office of Australia’s Women in STEM Ambassador, hosted by UNSW Sydney. She is co-founder of the Sydney Science Festival and an associate editor of the journal Astrobiology. On 1 December she began work with Science in Australia Gender Equity, where she works to improve equity, diversity and inclusion in the higher education and research sector.

Where and when were you born, and how has it shaped who you are?
Near Ottawa in 1980. I’m French Canadian. My dad didn’t speak English at all and found it a huge limitation. My parents wanted to make sure I had every opportunity so they sent me to an English-speaking school, where I learned English. It opened so many doors. I was able to get government jobs that required you to speak both languages. It allowed me to travel the world and eventually move to Australia.

Has education always been in your blood?
I came out as a teacher when I was little. I used to write lesson plans for my brother and make him do homework. Throughout high school I was teaching swimming and various things. When I got to uni, it was obvious I was going to be a teacher. But four years in the Canadian school system was enough for me. I became disenchanted with the view that we needed to get kids through rather than teach them the skills they needed to be contributing members of society. I moved to museum education, where I got to truly engage with young people. I worked at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. It was everything about education that I loved without all the politics and bureaucracy – and no report cards to write! When I moved to Australia I worked at the Powerhouse and Australian museums in Sydney.

Your PhD examined the learning impacts of science education in informal settings. How did that come about?
At the Powerhouse Museum, we created education programmes around the search for life on Mars. We had a Martian surface and rovers that students could drive remotely from their classrooms. Students got to do science the way Nasa scientists do it. I wondered what the students were learning and what skills they were gaining. I started doing some research, which turned into a PhD. It was about the cognitive impacts of doing real science rather than learning stuff from textbooks and being tested on it.

What did you discover?
Most people have misconceptions about how science is done. They think it’s a very linear, rigid process that doesn’t involve creativity, imagination or collaboration. It’s for old white men, and so on. By driving their science projects, working with scientists, presenting and defending their results to scientists, students developed a true sense of how science works. It completely changed their misconceptions and, for a lot of them, it transformed their interest in science.

Are your findings pertinent to universities?
University education is mostly just an extension of high school education. There might be a little bit more interactive learning thrown in, but it’s very much about consuming content and regurgitating it in an exam or assignment. One of the things the high school students learned was that science is uncertain. No matter how much they analysed their data, there was always this degree of uncertainty. They came out knowing that science is not 100 per cent fact. It’s tentative. People don’t understand that until they do it themselves. I don’t know how many honours students I’ve spoken to who said: “Now that I’m doing a research project for my honours thesis, all of a sudden there’s so much uncertainty and creativity. I didn’t know science was like this, even though I have a three-year science degree under my belt.”

Could we all benefit from that sense of uncertainty?
I did a TEDx talk a couple years ago about the kind of society we would have if more people understood the tentativeness of science. We would be able to make better judgements on what’s true and what’s not. We’d know that it’s not black and white – there’s nuance and a degree of grey. It’s often said that we need the humanities to humanise science, but we also need science to add nuance to the humanities.

If you loved informal science education so much that you did a doctorate on it, why did you sidestep into equity policy?
It was a career accident, but the best accident ever. I was finishing up my PhD and there was a job going at an Australian initiative called the Women in STEM ambassador. It was a research job that entailed some evaluation. I really needed a job. Once I got there, I thought – wow. The office is hosted by a university so the research is rigorous. It has a direct line to federal government departments, ministers, the chief scientist and other influential entities. Our work in the gender equity space has informed government policies and recommendations. Many researchers do amazing research but the direct impact is often difficult to tease out.

What sort of impact did you see?
Last year we worked on a research project analysing 20 years of Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council grants by gender, career seniority and field of research. Our findings directly informed the NHMRC’s decision to award 50 per cent of investigator grants to women and non-binary applicants at mid- and high-seniority levels.

What do you like about academia?
I love working for a university. You’re in a place where knowledge develops. You’re at the forefront of cutting-edge knowledge and you work with such incredible, interesting people.

What do you dislike about academia?
The whole idea of publish or perish, quantity over quality. It’s about number of publications, citations, journal status, how many grants you’ve got. They encourage collaboration but it’s hard to collaborate when there’s so much competition. Academia is stuck in the past. It needs to evolve to include social and broader impact rather than just publications and citations. It needs to consider quality of teaching and non-traditional research outputs. There’s a complete disconnect between what society values from researchers (service, non-academic outputs, policy work) and what the academic system values and rewards (publishing in high-status journals and getting grants).

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com

CV

1999-2004 Bachelor of science with honours, University of Ottawa
2004-05 Bachelor of education, Nipissing University
2004-08 Teacher, science and French, Ottawa area
2007-10 Producer/educator, Canada Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa
2010-17 Producer/educator, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Powerhouse Museum), Sydney
2011-12 Producer/educator, Australian Museum, Sydney
2015-17 Director/co-founder, Sydney Science Festival
2016-22 PhD in formal and informal science education, UNSW Sydney
2019 Researcher, University of Hong Kong
2019-20 Chief education and research officer, Arludo, Sydney
2019-23 Research associate and senior research associate, Australia’s Women in STEM Ambassador, UNSW Sydney
2023-present Senior adviser, research and evaluation, Science in Australia Gender Equity, Sydney

Appointments

Robert Dowd will be president of the University of Notre Dame from July next year, replacing John Jenkins, who is stepping down after serving as president for 19 years. Currently vice-president and associate provost for interdisciplinary initiatives at Notre Dame, Father Dowd is also an associate professor of political science. He said he would work to ensure the university was an “ever-greater engine of insight, innovation and impact, addressing society’s greatest challenges and helping young people to realise their potential for good”.

Audrey Leuba has been appointed the new rector of the University of Geneva, replacing Yves Flückiger whose term in office ends in March 2024. Professor Leuba is currently dean of the Faculty of Law at Geneva and was previously its vice-dean for education, having moved to the institution in 2006 from the University of Neuchâtel, where she was an assistant professor of law. Geneva highlighted Professor Leuba’s “excellent networks at the national and international levels”, which it said would help to address the “major challenges of funding and positioning” it faced.

Paul Matthews is joining the Rosalind Franklin Institute as its next director, moving from his current role as head of the brain sciences department at Imperial College London.

Christoph Lindner will be the next president and vice-chancellor of the Royal College of Art, joining in April from his current role as dean of the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at UCL.

Burtram Fielding, a molecular biologist at the University of the Western Cape, has been appointed the new dean of the Faculty of Science at Stellenbosch University.

Clive Roberts has been appointed the new executive dean (science) for Durham University. He is currently director of the Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education at the University of Birmingham.