Sixty minutes with ...

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The way Clare and I met is quite a story.

I finished my PhD, was recently married and my wife and I were keen to travel so I basically cold-called people in the science industry around the world. I applied to a lab in Lund, Sweden, and had an interview with someone called Anders Bjorklund. It was 1 am, I didn’t know if it went well or not, but I woke up the next morning and had been offered the position.

It turns out Clare had also finished her PhD, was applying to Swedish labs, was more astute than I was and idolised Bjorklund, who was on the Nobel committee and was a huge name in the neuroscience world. I had no idea who he was. She ended up at a lab in Stockholm and we heard about each other, as Australian postdocs working on similar stem cell research in that country.

We met in Sweden just before we both returned to Australia in 2008, and then coincidentally found ourselves at the Florey and this is where things became interesting. We were both championing what we’d been working on, the idea that stem cells could be transplanted into a brain to provide neurones to potentially cure Parkinson’s disease. The Australian leaders in the area at the time were strongly championing an alternative view, that neurones needed to be grown within the brain, to “self-repair” the disease. We were keen to explore our line of research but met strong resistance.

At that point, Clare and I could have been competitors and eaten each other alive, but we realised we could form a critical mass and team up. In about 2010, we chose to forge our own path together – Clare as a specialist in stem cell biology, creating neurones, while I’m a neuroanatomist, trying to get them into the brain.

People tend to lump us together but we both head up individual labs, even though we choose to run our teams together. It’s a nice environment for everybody, offering more options for our scientists to interact.

Clare and I are still competitive, as scientists are, but we are good willed about science and neither of us have Type A personalities. It’s not always smooth sailing and we can have frank discussions when we need to, but I think we both recognise that sometimes we have to step back for the long-term good of our work.

I admire Clare immensely. She is extremely dedicated to the science and is very organised – and someone has to be in a professional partnership. She has shown incredible resilience, having a child and then losing an entire year to battling ill health, yet she is still here, one of the top scientists in her field. Away from the office, our families are friends and share social circles. I’m close mates with her husband, Davor, who also works at the Florey. At work, Clare and I catch up for regular coffees as a nice environment to discuss a range of ideas and professional issues. It’s a wonderful professional relationship.

“ It was very unusual, how we were both in Sweden at the same time. We were very aware of each other – another Australian in a lab 700 km away – but every time went to do some work in Lund he was back in Australia.

We finally met in a pub for a pint and realised we were probably going to both come back to the Florey. When we arrived, it was a challenging period to integrate back into the Australian scientific community. They were not receptive to neural transplantation and the direction of research we were taking, so we weren’t supported to work together and in fact discouraged not to. But after a year or so, we finally teamed up.

We run our two labs separately but they are very overlapping. We co-supervise all our staff and students. Sometimes I actually drive more projects with his students than he does his own, and vice versa. It just depends how a project escalates and what the interest of an individual is, so we have a very strong trust and respect for each other’s research.

At the Florey, we are given great freedom to do the research we want. We have the freedom to drive our research in the direction we want to go and nobody ever says: “You can’t do this” or “The institute wants to go in a direction that is not aligned with what you’re working on”. That’s been a major attraction for us. Also, the animal facilities here are phenomenal, state of the art. We work with the animals that have compromised immune systems and need extra special care, and the housing conditions at the Florey are really the only ones in the country that can accommodate them.

Lachlan and I have both got a bit of each other’s skill set, yet my strengths lie in developmental biology and stem cells and Lachlan’s in neural transplantation. think that’s why it works so well.

I can’t optimally do my research without him and he can’t do his research without me. That helps create boundaries on the work as well.

Lachlan is such a healthy sounding board. That’s one of the things I most enjoy about working together. He will tell me very openly if he thinks something is a bad idea. Mostly we are both highly supportive of each other’s career development and, in such a competitive environment, it’s nice to have support from somebody. Lachlan is the one who will say: “You know, you’re really good at this, you should pursue that, it speaks to your strengths” or “Watch out, you’re getting distracted, channel your energy better”. I love his honesty and frankness.

When I became ill with breast cancer, Lachlan was amazing. There was roughly 16 months where I wasn’t able to work at full capacity, but he ran both labs. He would visit me at the hospital, at home or a local coffee shop when I couldn’t get in to the Florey. And he’d be like: “Just touching base. This is what’s running; these are problems; how do you want to manage this?”. He saved me having to come in and manage the team. Instead, I was interacting just with him and he was running the info back to them. He was really great.