For someone with her head in the stars, Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith is remarkably grounded. This internationally acclaimed astrophysicist, writer and communicator is Australia’s first Women in STEM ambassador, leading government efforts to encourage women and girls to study and work in science, technology, engineering and maths. It’s a role that also aims to eliminate entrenched gender bias in the research sector.
Harvey-Smith’s extraordinary career – apart from her astronomy and ambassadorial work, she is also a best-selling author and TV presenter, appearing with the likes of Brian Cox and Buzz Aldrin – sprang from an equally extraordinary childhood. Growing up in the county of Essex, in south-east England, she attended the local primary school, where her mother was head teacher. But at 11, she decided she’d had enough of school.
From there she had what she describes as a “sort of feral self-education,” shunning formal education, guided by her dad at home with her while her mum was the breadwinner.
“My dad read a lot about educational theory – he has no formal qualifications, but he’s very smart and loves reading,” Harvey-Smith explains. “I wasn’t taught anything formally. I imposed all the structure on myself. I wasn’t made to do anything. I watched TV – the Open University and the BBC did fantastic educational shows. I would watch some of those in the morning, I’d read books and I’d play musical instruments.”
It wasn’t always highbrow pursuits: “I watched Home and Away with my dad at lunchtime, which was an inspiration for coming to Australia!”
At 16 Harvey-Smith went back to school, attending the innovative Braintree College. Surprisingly, resuming formal education was not a shock to her system. “I thrived there,” Harvey-Smith recalls. “It wasn’t like a school at all – more like a university.”
This remarkable childhood set Harvey-Smith firmly on track for her stellar career. After university she moved to the Netherlands, where she took part in some of the first global real-time electronic experiments with VLBI, before moving to Sydney in 2007 to explore how magnetic fields shape supernova remnants. She was then CSIRO’s project scientist for the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project, and instrumental in Australia’s bid to host the SKA.
“I thrive in an environment where I’m trusted and allowed to do my own thing,” she says. “If I’m constrained, I become the Incredible Hulk. Teaching myself at home gave me self-discipline and focus.”
When you allow a child to determine their own future, you give them that wonderful freedom, but also the understanding that if they don’t succeed, it’s down to them. I think it’s a nice thing to give a child that sense of self-responsibility.”
Harvey-Smith fell in love with astronomy at 12, when she discovered the delights of the night sky while observing the planet Mars with her dad. “In some ways, stars are obvious for people to understand,” she says, before articulating the distant worlds into which her career as an astronomer has led her. “But I don’t think people realise that the lives of stars are incredibly diverse. Some are 10,000 times bigger and hotter than others, and they’re all different colours. They have different personalities. They sometimes live in partnerships, and sometimes they eat each other. They have lifetimes and they change within their lifetime very dramatically.
“My aim is to uncover the secret life of stars and tell people how amazingly diverse the night sky is, so you can look up there and think, wow, I hadn’t considered any of those things.”
Communication came almost by accident. The findings of Harvey-Smith’s PhD, in radioastronomy, studying regions of star formation encased in clouds of alcohol that were billions of kilometres long, made headlines globally. “I managed at that stage to transform serious, boring science into something that people could understand, and a hook that journalists can jump onto.”
She soon discovered that she had an instinct and a talent for public speaking. Her writing sprang from that and her first book, When Galaxies Collide, was published in 2018. Since then, she’s planned to write a book a year, and succeeded in doing it. “I just set aside my evenings and weekends for about three or four months and I write a book – it’s a fun thing to do every year,” Harvey-Smith explains. “I start with an idea, a vision in my head and an image of the reader. It’s a conversation with anyone who is interested.”
That connection is vital to Harvey-Smith who loves “the adrenaline rush” of being on stage for the public-speaking commitments of her role. “I’m taking people on a journey, through the process of analysis and thought. I’ve enjoyed doing TV, but I can’t fall in love with it the same way that I do with in-person communication with an audience, because you see their faces, their smiles, their surprise when they’re thinking or feeling something.”
Like many scientists turned communicators, Harvey-Smith sees a gap in how research finds a wider audience.
What we reward in academia is a bit perverse – publications, citations and how much grant funding we can pull in,” she says. “Communication doesn’t figure in that. I think there’s a gap for a type of professional at a university; a researching science communicator. There are professional science communicators in universities, but I feel they’re not sufficiently engaged with the research to seek out opportunities from people who aren’t coming to them.”
“There are a lot of quiet achievers in universities who won’t have their research highlighted, won’t be in the newspapers and won’t get an Order of Australia. And then they won’t get the research funding. I think universities could do a lot better to help their staff to communicate to get ahead,” Harvey-Smith says “If universities want public funding, they need to make the case for continuously answering all the misinformation.”
The Federal Government’s Women in STEM initiative addresses another major gap. “Between 2006 and 2016 there was only a 2% increase in women working in STEM,” Harvey-Smith says. “That glacial pace is not going to make much difference. We want to create a system-wide change.
“The Department of Industry is very good at moving towards evidence-based policy decisions. But research grant applications are often made without a guided planning phase. What we’re trying to create is a system in which applicants can plan their programs with reference to what they are trying to achieve, and what will be the lasting benefit to everyone, so that when the program is finished, things don’t just go back to how they were before.”
Harvey-Smith was a member of the expert advisory group that guided the formulation of the government’s 10-year plan for women in STEM. She is also working on an initiative to change children’s views about STEM. “Stereotypes about STEM are very damaging to young people’s aspirations, and we want to tackle that at the root at a very young age. We want to present young people with strong, fun, interesting, diverse role models and show them how the world can be changed for the better using STEM.”
Harvey-Smith knows from her own experience the impact of childhood aspirations and passions on a later career.
The most wonderful thing was when I put out my children’s book, Under The Stars, and the thousands of children that I met at events,” she says. “They loved the book and the way that it made them think differently. It makes me happy to think that every time I sign a book for a child, they’re going to treasure that for years, which might create the next Lisa Harvey-Smith.”
Lisa Harvey-Smith’s latest book, The Secret Life of Stars, aimed at adults and young adults, is out now.
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Visit the Women in STEM ambassador site
Article by Iain Scott
Photo credit: Photo supplied
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