Tassie women researchers are leading the way but say equality in science is a long way off
On International Women’s Day, two top Tasmanian scientists say equality in science is a long way off and much more needs to be done to stem the leaky career pipeline in the industry.
Lifestyle
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DESPITE working in the male-dominated field of science research, Dr Lila Landowski and Dr Emma Eaton have risen to the top and made some incredible medical advancements during their careers.
But, due to funding uncertainty, both have now moved into other fields.
Growing up in Hobart’s northern suburbs was no impediment to either woman’s future success.
Landowski, a neuroscientist, was working on new ways to study strokes that could potentially save billions of dollars. She was also investigating the brain processes behind fatigue.
Eaton discovered potential new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and researched technology for quickly screening stroke treatments.
TASSIE’S STEM SUPERSTARS ARE SMASHING STEREOTYPES
How will we be able to cope with the next global health challenge if we can’t support our brightest to continue to work in Australia?
Both women agree that while a career in medical research is rewarding it has its challenges.
“Last year we saw a historic low in Australian health and medical research funding,” Landowski says.
“Over 90 per cent of grant applicants missed out in the last round of NHMRC funding [the National Health and Medical Research Council, which is the main source of funding for Australian medical researchers].
“Not because the research isn’t excellent and worthy of funding, just because there simply aren’t enough funds.
“There are so many untold costs of underfunding Australian research. I’ve watched so many brilliant local scientists be forced to stop their important research because their funding dried up.
“Their expertise and skills are suddenly lost, and many take their brilliant ideas elsewhere, to places like the USA or Europe, where it is easier to get funding.
“How will we be able to cope with the next global health challenge if we can’t support our brightest to continue to work in Australia?”
Another challenge in science is the gender imbalance.
On International Women’s Day today, Eaton and Landowski say equality in science is still a way off.
“There’s more than 30 per cent of women entering science, technology, engineering and mathematics [STEM] degrees, but less than 14 per cent of women in the top science jobs,” Landowski says.
“The career pipeline is leaky – women are being pushed out along the way. I think we need to work harder to address this.
“We need diversity. This is especially important in the sciences, because more diverse teams generate better outcomes.”
When asked if more should be done to encourage women to pursue a career in science – Eaton, who has three daughters aged 16, 7 and 4, shrugs.
“No need, they already want one. What we really need to ask is what can we do to stop them having to leave.”
Landowski’s parents were Polish migrants and she grew up in public housing in West Moonah.
In the face of adversity she has received many accolades throughout her career, including the 2015 Premier’s Young Achiever of the Year, Tasmanian finalist for Young Australian of the Year in 2016, one of the Chief Scientist of Australia’s “science superheroes”, the ABC’s Top 5 Science Scholars in 2019, a Superstar of STEM and she is an ambassador for public education in Tasmania.
A recreational fishing trip was the catalyst for Landowski pursuing a career in science.
“I was at a Grade 4 school camp, and I caught my first fish. As I was holding the fish, I noticed its cloying slime sticking to my fingers like webbing between my fingers.
“I’d recently heard about shark liver oil capsules being good for your health, so it was then that I decided I wanted to find another fish extract that could help people – so my dream of wanting to work in medical research was born.
“When I arrived at university, I initially started doing a Bachelor’s degree in Marine, Freshwater and Antarctic Biology – thinking that could get me to where I wanted to go.
“Then I discovered they had just started a new Bachelor of Medical Research degree – and I instantly knew I’d found the degree which would set me on the path to the career I wanted, one that involves better understanding the human body and developing new treatments for people.”
Landowski later moved into a career in neuroscience, completing her honours and then a PhD in the field.
“I ended up demonstrating that a specific natural protein could tell regenerating neurons which direction to grow.
“This is important, because one of the reasons people don’t recover from brain, spinal cord or nerve injuries properly is because the neurons try to regenerate, but they don’t know where they are supposed to regrow to.
“If you’re a regenerating neuron in a damaged spinal cord and you need to reconnect to a muscle in your big toe – there’s a very complicated set of instructions you need to follow to grow back to that spot. While this protein isn’t able to provide a detailed map that helps neurons regrow across the body to the right spot, it can tell some neurons which direction to grow in, which is a really important step.
“I then continued this work in my PhD, and found out that the protein seemed to have a remarkable ability to regenerate injured nerves in the skin.
“While my childhood dream of wanting to find cures in fish was a really naive dream, ironically the protein that I demonstrated could speed up nerve regeneration in the skin, is also found in fish.”
More recently, Landowski has been focused on stroke research.
“For the last four and a half years I’ve been working with Professor David Howells, investigating stroke, the second leading cause of death worldwide, as well as trying to understand what happens in the brain when we’re fatigued – an issue that affects all of us, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.There’s currently one drug therapy for people who have had a stroke – and more than 90 per cent of stroke patients end up being ineligible to receive that one drug. So we have a huge need for developing new stroke treatments.
“There have been over 1000 treatments developed for stroke that work in a petri dish, or in animals, but not in humans.
“Why don’t they work in humans? Well, we’re starting to understand why.
“Part of the problem lies in the way these drugs are tested; it isn’t perfect.
“With the generous support of the Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation, I’ve been developing a new model for testing these potential therapies, so that drug development for human stroke can be more successful.
“This research could save about $1.9 billion of the estimated $14.6 billion dollar cost of developing a new stroke therapy. We’re currently looking for more funds to continue this important work.
“Our stroke research has faced challenges – as all research on the frontier does – because you’re stepping into completely unknown territory. In order to achieve the goals of our research, we needed to use magnetic nanoparticles in our experiments.
“After much trial and error with my PhD student Allanna Russell, we discovered there was no one in the world that could consistently make the nanoparticles we needed.
“So what do you do? You can give up. Or, you can innovate.
“With the help of Dr Curtis Ho, local chemist and nanoparticle queen Dr Rebecca Fuller and I have managed to make our own nanoparticles.
“I never thought as a neuroscientist I would find myself working in the completely distant field of chemistry, refining nanotechnology for research purposes.”
Landowski said the disappointing thing was imagining what may have been possible with continued funding and research.
“If I had more funding, I would continue our stroke research with Prof Howells and Dr Fuller.
“We’re just on the cusp of taking this research to the next step, but because the time has run out on our generous funding, the research is sitting in limbo.
“I would have also liked to explore whether the natural protein I worked on previously could help people with a type of nerve injury called peripheral neuropathy.
“Imagine surviving cancer, only to suffer from debilitating pain for the rest of your life? Unfortunately, this is a common reality for many people who have had chemotherapy, or suffer from diabetes.
“Chemotherapy can injure the nerves in the skin, causing a condition called chemotherapy-induced neuropathy.
“Up to 50 per cent of people with diabetes will suffer from neuropathy too.”
With funding constraints putting an end to her research for now, Landowski has transitioned into a new career.
“This year I’ve been recruited to teach in the University of Tasmania across a range of subjects in health and medicine.
“It is such a privilege to help train the next generation of healthcare workers.
“I’m also an Executive Director for the Australian Society for Medical Research, which works to advocate for the nation’s health and medical research sector.”
Emma Eaton grew up in Gagebrook and went to Herdsmans Cove primary and high schools before attending Claremont College. Her interest in science started at an early age.
“I’ve wanted to be a scientist for as long as I can remember,” Eaton says.
“I’m a great science fiction lover and even before I reached double digits, I had devoured novel after novel where the future was brighter and better with technology, and I wanted to be a part of that.
“I was about eight or nine, I think, when I thought I could cure AIDS. I understood the basic idea that there was a virus in the blood that had to be got rid of and I had a theory that if the bleach in the laundry was so good at getting things clean and sterile then it must be a perfect candidate for cleaning the blood.
“I then set up in the laundry for weeks with my chemistry set and all the laundry chemicals. I’d like to thank my mother for her patience and for throwing out my developing concoctions before I got to the testing phase.
“Now, obviously, bleach as a therapy for AIDS was a terrible idea. I’d like to hope my research ideas definitely got better with time, but it came about with curiosity, idea development, and a desire to make things better – which is the basis of science.”
Despite her curiosity in science Eaton always believed it was a career out of reach to someone with her upbringing.
“As odd as it sounds, I never knew I was allowed to [be a scientist].
“I grew up in one of the most socio-economically disadvantaged areas of Tasmania and everything I knew about university came from watching American TV shows.
“I really thought that poor people weren’t allowed to go to uni or become scientists.
“It wasn’t until I was 18 and talking to my Physical Sciences teacher Sue Schaap at Claremont College about how I had always wanted to be a scientist that I found out it was something I was allowed to do.
“It was a day that changed the direction of my life because that very day I decided that I was going to follow my dream.”
Eaton studied a Bachelor of Science with a double major in chemistry and biochemistry.
“I reached a crossroads at this point because I was offered honours scholarships in both analytical chemistry and biochemistry. After weighing the projects I chose the biochemistry project, which was based around diabetes therapies.”
It was a decision influenced by a family member who suffers from diabetes.
Another relative also had a profound influence on her research.
“My grandmother passed during my honours year. She had suffered from dementia,” Eaton says. “She was always so proud of me even though she could never remember what I did.
“If visitors came while I was with her she would say ‘This is my granddaughter, Emma. She’s so wonderful. She is … what do you do again?’. I thought this was so beautiful and sad. She couldn’t remember why she felt that way, but the feeling was strong enough for her to not forget.
“That’s probably the reason I left what was an excellent post-honours summer internship as an analytical chemist to take up a position as a neuroscience research assistant.”
She later did a PhD within the School of Medicine and the Menzies Research Institute.
“For my PhD I looked at potential new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
“My supervisors had for a long time been interested in a protein called Metallothionein 2. They found that under some conditions this protein could help protect brain cells from dying and even help them regrow when injured.
“We became very interested in it as a potential Alzheimer’s therapeutic but unfortunately we could not get it into the brain as it was too big to bypass the brain’s protective barrier.
“By a stroke of fortune, another group in Copenhagen was making smaller proteins based on Metallothionein 2, which could get through to the brain.
“My PhD was to test these smaller proteins to see if any of them had the capability of protecting brain cells against Alzheimer’s disease.
“I was so fortunate in this project. I found that one of these fragments in particular was able to protect brain cells and that it was able to improve memory in an Alzheimer’s model.
“Unfortunately, we were not able to get grants to fund this research any further and our group had to move on to other projects.”
But Eaton says despite the setback she is proud of what she has been able to achieve.
“The work resulting from my PhD into potential new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease was so promising that it led to a licensing agreement between UTAS and the biotechnology company, Alzhyme Pty Ltd.
“Because of this, research into this technology is still ongoing despite the fact that we could not obtain any government grants to fund the work.
“My most recent research was in the field of stroke. I did my postdoctoral research in the UTAS School of Medicine with the Stroke Research Unit.
“I was using embryonic stem cells to produce human brain cells so that new drug therapies for stroke patients could be tested quickly and cheaply on human brain cells.”
Eaton said the underfunding of medical research was an insurmountable issue.
“The current funding situation for science researchers is incredibly uncertain. I decided to leave research due to the job uncertainty. I have three gorgeous children and a wonderful husband who were getting very little of my time.
“We couldn’t build our house because I was on one-year contracts that relied on funding and we never knew from one year to the next if the funding would be there.
“I myself got tired of watching excellent researchers lose their funding and lose their jobs all while they dedicated their lives to helping others.
“While science is so underfunded in Australia we will continue to lose our scientists to other countries or other endeavours.
“We researchers have endless ideas to pursue but are hugely limited by resources. I would have really loved to pursue both the Alzheimer’s disease therapeutics and the technology for screening stroke treatments. I think both of these projects have the potential make a better future.”
Eaton is now an analytical chemist working at Nyrstar in Hobart.
“This has been an incredibly satisfying change for me and not only do I get to do science all day but my new workplace allows me to continue to better myself by supporting me to get new qualifications in areas that interest me,” she says.
“They’ve also supported me in my passion to go back into my community and help make a difference in the lives of other kids who are growing up in my area, inviting me to be a part of a special titration competition and donating equipment to my old school – the Jordan River Learning Federation – where I was asked to be the school’s ambassador for STEM.”
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