AAS | Events | 14-15 February 2008

Bryan Gaensler Bryan Gaensler received his PhD in physics from The University of Sydney in 1998. He subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Smithsonian Institution, followed by four years at Harvard University as an Associate Professor of Astronomy, returning to Australia in 2006. His current research interests focus on the origin of interstellar magnetism.

Bryan was the 1999 Young Australian of the Year, gave the 2001 Australia Day Address to the nation, and was the recipient of the 2006 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize awarded by the American Astronomical Society. He has authored over 140 scientific papers, and has written dozens of popular articles on science and astronomy.

Thanks a lot for having me along today. I have really enjoyed meeting some of you and hearing about the different ways of doing research across whole disciplines.

As Jenny said, I was away for 10 years. I am now back and Australia is a very different place, a very dynamic place for research, and I am very happy I made the move. I would say that my time overseas wasn't just beneficial or part of my growth process, but transformational. I am not only talking about the 10 years I spent working over there, but even while I was a student I would come back from the trips that I made feeling as if my head was bursting, because I had so many new ideas and a so much bigger outlook. So I would argue that going overseas is not just something you should do, but has the potential to transform.

We talked about people who actually change fields. I would say that if you want to jump right out of the box and do something different, then seeing how things are done in a different country is a good way to help push you over that barrier. And when I say you should get overseas, I don't mean you should go to a conference or you should give a talk, but you should immerse yourself in what is on offer overseas. It is not always practical or possible to actually move overseas, but there are fellowships and visiting programs. If you are not prepared to actually live in another country, then do more than go for a week – actually spend a solid chunk of time working with people overseas, and it will be transformational for you too.

Firstly, I can't emphasise too strongly how other countries, because of both cultural issues and different historical aspects, have a fundamentally different approach to their research. You cannot understand this until you actually experience it first hand. It is not enough just to know, 'Oh, they have Professor So-and-So who works on something that's different from me,' they actually approach their research in a different way. There will be a different interaction between the senior researchers and the junior researchers. I am mainly talking about my field, physics, but certainly in physics in Germany, the group leader basically hands out projects and you get given your project and that's what you work on. In the United States it is very much more that everyone down to the students are treated as colleagues who kick around ideas together.

So if you want to experience different ways of doing things, each with their strengths and weaknesses, you have to immerse yourself in that system.

There are also whole areas – it's hard to believe – huge swathes of research that we just have no coverage of at all in Australia. For example, in Australian astronomy, which is my field, all of astronomy is very much seen as either optical astronomy, where you peer through a telescope, or radioastronomy, where you steer with a dish. That is a lot of astronomy, but actually we are right now in the golden age of X-ray astronomy, where you build a spacecraft and launch it above the Earth's atmosphere, and you take an X-ray of the sky. Australia has a little bit of involvement with that, but very, very little. In my three years after my PhD I went to MIT, in Boston. They have an entire department that has been doing X-ray astronomy since the 1960s. Ironically, a lot of that was actually done in Australia by Americans, but you have got a whole department full of people who work in a whole branch of science that we basically don't do at all.

So how do you get yourself into that? How do you jump on bandwagons or change fields or immerse yourself in the cutting edge if you don't go to the places where they are doing it?

The next thing is the idea of a sea of experts. It isn't just, 'I work on topic X and the one other person who does topic X happens to be in Italy.' The scale of what is on offer in other countries is beyond belief. In my own story, when I did my PhD I was the only person in the country who actually knew something about that particular topic. Both of my supervisors worked in related areas, but they didn't really know anything about my topic. When I say I was the only person who knew about it, I mean I was the only person who thought they knew about it, because when I went overseas and talked to the experts I realised I didn't know anything at all. Instead of reading things in a book and reading a sentence 10 times to try and understand what it means, it was incredible to actually talk to people over a beer or over dinner and have an hour of interaction with them. The ultimate for this was when I went to Harvard University, where I was for about five years, I found there are more PhDs in astronomy at Harvard than in all of Australia, by about a factor of 4. Imagine having a department which is four times bigger than your entire country's resources.

Another example: I asked one of my colleagues in Boston, who works in genetics, why he didn't want to come back to Australia. And in his particular case he said that in the US, if he wants a mouse with a certain gene he can order it and he'll have it in his lab the next day. At that time, at least, and in his particular situation, that was not an option in Australia. So there are some things that you just cannot get access to unless you get experience overseas.

The next point is that the international dimension gives you a much larger pool of access to resources and access to people. Astronomy is one of the most international sciences, because if you only want to stay in Australia then you have a problem: you can only see half the sky. So even if you have no interest in international astronomy you do have to occasionally go to the Northern Hemisphere. Telescopes are an international resource, and if you are not an astronomer then you might need a supercomputer or a particle accelerator, or any particular type of equipment, to do your research.

Also, as a leader of a group I can't possibly do every research project myself, as much as I would like to. I regard my postdocs and my students as an extension of my vision – but they normally do a much better job than I could have done. I don't think you have to confine yourself to thinking of your group as just the people who you can get funding for at university. If you can co-supervise students or mentor postdocs in other countries, that extends your capabilities and provides them with new opportunities as well. And there are billions of very, very smart people out there. Just because they are not working in Australia doesn't mean they can't be part of your team.

Then there is the idea that as scientists we are purely there for the expansion of knowledge and we are not interested in the nuts and bolts of a career. But the reality is that if you want to write those papers, then you need a job and you need recognition and you need grants, and that means you need to network and you need to expose yourself. I used to think that just writing good papers would propel you up any ladder you needed to go up, but I now know from my own experience that I unfortunately don't have time to read a lot of papers, and going to conferences and meeting people is the only way in which they can pass on to me what they have done.

So there is a whole bunch of reasons in this regard to build up that international connection. If you give a good talk at a conference, and someone in the audience thinks, 'That's a pretty good talk,' well, that might be the person who has money to advertise a job next year that you might want to apply for, and that one good talk will go a lot further than whatever clever things you write in your job application.

You are all going to need reference letters at various stages in your career, and even if you stay solely within Australia it obviously carries a huge amount of weight if you can reflect, just by your list of references, that you are internationally recognised and you do have international collaborators. Obviously you value your colleagues for their abilities and for their ideas and for what they can bring to your team, but you shouldn't lose sight of the fact that by working with good people you also pick up people who can write you very strong reference letters.

In many fields, to start getting asked to give invited reviews at conferences is a big step along the way to the top. Generally if you are someone that people have never met – they have just seen a paper – they are unlikely to ask you to come to meetings, but once you are in the loop there tends to be a self-propagating process until you are sick of giving that talk and you want somebody else to give it! But certainly if you hope to speak at meetings, then you need to start going to them and making sure people know who you are.

If you want to do the best possible research, you need a constant influx of new ideas and you need a breadth of resources that can quite often only be gained through international collaboration and linkages. And at least in the ARC, that is actually rewarded. There are specific grant programs that require you to have international connections. If you want access to that money, then you need to think internationally.

Finally – hopefully, this is an obvious statement for everyone in the room – there aren't many useful aspects of science which can just be done in isolation. Even if you are not actively working with people in other countries, they all tie in to what you are doing. Again in astronomy this is beyond the ridiculous in terms of internationalism. One of the smallest projects I am working on is called ChiCAGO. This is one that I actually control myself, just sitting at a computer, with no massive infrastructure or bureaucracy involved, yet even that small project involves 19 people from 12 institutions in four countries. That's pretty small. The biggest project which I am involved in is a telescope to be built in the next 10 years called the Square Kilometre Array, with a budget of about $2 billion. I guess there are several hundred people, spread over 18 countries, involved in that. So there is international collaboration everywhere I go. And in other branches of science, such as particle physics, it is taken to an even more ridiculous extreme, with many dozens of countries and thousands of people.

So that's all great; there's no question that doing international research is a good thing. But there are some problems and some challenges.

I am going to run through what I see as the challenges specifically for people who might be early in their career, and specifically for people in Australia, and then I am going to run through some germs of ideas for possible ways to address these challenges.

The first one is, 'Well, we don't have a big telescope. Some other country does. But they say that only their country can use it.' For example, one of the largest optical telescopes in the world, the VLT – that stands for Very Large Telescope, which it is – is run by the European Union, and generally speaking unless you are European it is pretty hard to get time on it. So that gives Europeans a huge advantage. There are other big telescopes that are completely owned and operated by universities, and unless you are in that university you don't have it. There are other facilities which are open to use, but you can't use them unless you are actually physically there. You need to travel and spend a week at this synchrotron beam in some other country to use it, and Australia being a small country and being far away from many of the big toys around the world, that presents a barrier.

There is also simply the practical difficulty of international collaboration. I'm sure you would all know this, but email has hardly solved any of the problems of distance, because even if we had teleportation, in Australia we would still have the problem of time zones. I have lost count of the number of absolutely critical meetings which I have very strong opinions on or have an important role to play in that are scheduled so that they are in the morning in the US, in the afternoon in Europe, and at 2 o'clock in the morning in Australia. It is continually challenging for Australians, I think, to contribute meaningfully to telephone conversations. Even worse, when someone asks a question by email and someone else replies, and there is a huge argument and they fall out and then everything is resolved, that all happens between when you go to bed and when you wake up the next morning. So I think the 'tyranny of distance' is a problem, even with email, even with the telephone. And I think there is very much a tendency for Australians to get left out: if I am in the US and I want to speak to a colleague in the US I will just pick up the phone, whereas in Australia I have to send them an email and then wait for a response the next day.

Then there is the money problem. Going overseas, as I am discovering since I moved back, is very expensive. Just one trip to Sweden next month is going to cost $7000, for one week there. (If you wanted a cheap trip, I guess you wouldn't go to Sweden.) It is a huge drain on whatever money you have, to make a meaningful number of overseas trips each year.

What is worse, a number of funding schemes explicitly exclude conference travel. They say, 'You can use this money to collaborate internationally, but it is not for conferences.' So if your way of collaborating is to go to a conference, give a talk and see your colleagues, well, forget it.

Another problem I find – and I am sure everyone has experienced this problem, whether you are supervising a group or working in a group – is the dreaded problem of knocking on the door and saying to the boss, 'Can I please go to this conference?' I hated doing it when I was working for other people and I hate my staff asking me, because I feel as if I am holding them back if I say, 'You can't go to this meeting,' and I don't see why I should be deciding for them whether this meeting is better than that meeting. It is a very difficult problem, I think, given that you can only make a finite number of trips per year, because of the limit on money and also because of your sanity. I find it very difficult, running a reasonable size group, that for every single person I need to say, 'You should go to this. I don't think you should go to that.'

An issue which you should not underestimate is promoting your work to the public. I think it is very important that your work be promoted, both because it teaches you useful skills and also because I don't think there is any point in doing funded research unless people know what you are doing. But one of the problems is that although many universities and organisations have media units, quite often the press releases only get picked up by a local audience. So you will get good coverage on ABC News or maybe in the Australian, but world-wide, people might not know about your work. I think it is reasonably unusual that an Australian breakthrough gets international coverage.

The best way to get coverage if you have got a really exciting result is to hold a press conference, but you can hardly expect the New York Times or Le Monde to be sitting at your press conference in Canberra. Again it is problematic: even if you have got a good media unit and good connections, you are just not going to get the word out beyond Australia.

The other thing is that, at least in astronomy, nothing sells a story like good graphics, good animations and good media kits. A good tagline is nice, but if there is a pretty picture it will go a lot further, particularly in television. Unfortunately, that is sometimes beyond the resources of your one poor media person in your organisation – they do not have the time, the ability or the resources to put together something fancy to sell your work.

I see another problem, as an employer, of recruiting the best people. If I want to do world-class work, if I think that my group is going to be the best in the world at what it does, it is not just a case of having good ideas or a good reputation; I have to have good people coming through the door. When I was at Harvard University it was great, because all the best people in the world wanted to say they had 'Harvard University' on their résumé. I could put out an ad and people I would not even have dreamed or hoped to be able to get were begging me to hire them, because they wanted to get into the Harvard system. (Obviously, having that on your résumé will help you get that next job.)

So one of my concerns in moving back to Australia was not that I was moving back to a backwater, but that people would think I was in a backwater and when I put out the same job ad and said 'University of Sydney', I would not get the same sorts of people applying as I would get at Harvard University.

A related problem is that if I have money and I am going to hire someone, the reality is that, at least in my field, there are probably going to be only about five to 10 people that meet the job description. I know that in the life sciences there is a huge need for technical staff and laboratory staff, with probably more generalised skills, but a lot of the hires in astronomy are people at the PhD level and I want them to work on a particular job. Some people can jump over to that field, but if I want someone who can hit the ground running, then I don't have a wide pool of people.

There is always going to be a group of people in your university who are in a different field, but for whatever reason are not looking overseas or moving cities, and you will always get internal candidates. Sometimes these will be just the people you need – there will be someone who has made a career of being able to switch fields every three years and so on.

At other times, though, you are in a situation where you have a choice. You have got the money and you can hire someone – and perhaps you need to hire someone – but you have a choice: 'Am I better off hiring someone and worrying that they might not really be able to do a good job on this, it will take them two of their three years to get up to speed, or am I better off actually not hiring anybody at all?' You really don't want to be in a situation where you even have to think about not hiring someone.

I think there is a real problem in Australia, if you are lucky enough to have money to hire someone, that the best international candidates are going to get a lot of offers. And a lot of those offers could even be prize fellowships which give them a fancy name on their résumé and also the opportunity to work for themselves, to be independent for a number of years, with their own funding, rather than to work for you. There is also very much a perception in academia of a trajectory that you need to stay on: after your PhD you get one fellowship and then maybe a second one, and then you get a permanent job. In some countries, particularly the US, there is a perception that that trajectory involves staying in the US, and if you move to another country then you are somehow stepping out of the loop and you are making a decision that you are not part of that trajectory any more. So I think there is a real hard sell at every step, in convincing people to come to Australia, because you don't want them to feel they are throwing away their career to join you.

Finally, if you choose to go overseas, I think the real battle you face – unless you are prepared to say, 'Thanks, Australia, I probably won't ever visit you again,' if you want to retain some connection to Australia or perhaps even get back here one day – is to stay connected. In Australia as well as anywhere else, it is very much 'out of sight, out of mind.' Particularly if you do your PhD overseas and then you do a postdoc overseas and then you get another job overseas, in a lot of ways you are not really considered Australian. You might have an Australian passport, but you have not contributed to the Australian community of knowledge, and people might not even be aware that you are hoping to get a job back in Australia one day.

I meet a lot of people who are Aussies, who are homesick, who want to come back, and who say, 'Oh, I look on the Internet and there's just never anything available.' I think it is not a very good strategy just to sit overseas waiting; you have to stay connected, because you have got to be aware of the evolving landscape. Funding situations change, new opportunities arise. I also think there is a moral obligation: if you are Australian educated, like me, then the government has sunk a ridiculous amount of money into your education and your training. When I was in the US, every time a press release with my work came out saying, 'Harvard University scientist did this,' it was a bit of a twist in the gut – I was happy that my work got publicised, but it didn't say 'Australian scientist', it said 'Harvard University scientist'. Australia got no recognition for what it helped make possible.

I see this actually as a closed loop. I am telling you that you should try and get overseas experience. Well, how better to facilitate that than to take advantage of all those Aussies overseas feeling guilty about what they are not doing for Australia? If you are overseas, then you should be seeing this as an opportunity to help mentor the next generation. If you have got a colleague back at Sydney or Melbourne or Perth, say, 'Send your student over to my lab. I'll cover local costs and they will work with me for six weeks,' and that will be a transformational experience for that student or that postdoc.

So those are some of the problems that face us. I am now going to go through them and talk about a possible solution to each one.

The first problem I will address is access to international facilities: other countries have big telescopes and we want to use them too.

Firstly, if some giant facility has some explicit restriction that you cannot use it unless you are Japanese, or American, or European, that normally doesn't prevent collaborations or even students working with them. So if you have a good idea for a big telescope and you have a good student, say to your Japanese (or American) colleague, 'Would you like to co-supervise a student?' and then the student can go over and get the advantage of using that facility.

Perhaps you can get use of the facility but you do not have the money to actually get over there. Then there is a government program called the Access to Major Research Facilities Program, which provides full funding to use overseas facilities, where that facility is not available in Australia. If there is some piece of equipment or some spacecraft or a computer that is not in Australia and you need to go there, then ANSTO [Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation] administers a scheme by which you can get your airfare and everything else paid for, so you can go over and use it. That was incredibly beneficial to me in my PhD, allowing me to use some facilities overseas that Australia simply did not have.

As far as international collaboration goes – the issue of the 3 o'clock teleconference and the email arguments that you miss out on because you are asleep – there are actually a lot of ways to get money to go overseas to collaborate. A lot of funding schemes explicitly say that they support strategic planning, which means that if, just say, you are working on an ARC grant in six months' time and it involves your international collaborators, then instead of emailing back and forth to figure out who is going to do what, there is money available for you to go over there and plan out what you are going to do over the next five years.

As the minister mentioned this morning, there is a program run by DIISR [Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research] called International Science Linkages, which is an undersubscribed program. It is explicit government funding to build new links with overseas countries.

And I think our secret weapon is our country. A lot of colleagues will say, 'I don't want to go to Australia. It's too far, too expensive,' but once you get them here, you can't get rid of them. I have an astronomy colleague who goes to the Australian Open every January. She always finds some scientific pretext to pay most of her airfares, so she does a good month of science and then goes to the tennis. It is surprisingly easy to get your foreign colleagues to visit, and once you get them here it is obviously much easier for you than it would be for you to go there.

What about the money for overseas travel? I think in this respect you have to be quite resourceful. There is a ridiculous number of different funding options. But instead of getting an email and thinking, 'Too bad, that doesn't apply to me,' you need to think, 'How can I adjust what I do so that it fits into the requirements of this grant?' Your university probably has a whole list of bequests from people – scholarships to travel that just sit there growing money because no-one uses them; there are a whole bunch of government fellowships, there are industry fellowships; even professional societies like the Australian Institute of Physics provide grants. And even your community may help: if you really don't have any money, you would be surprised what your local football club or RSL can do if it helps benefit someone in the town that you happen to live in.

The ARC has International Fellowships to fund people to go overseas for several years. There are certainly restrictions on funding associated with conferences, but it is exhausting to go overseas just for a week anyway and it makes a lot of sense to bundle a conference with other travel. If you have got funding to go and work with a collaborator for a week, then time it so that you go and work with that collaborator and also go to a conference right before or right afterward.

As far as the dreaded problem is concerned of someone asking me, 'Can I go to a conference, please?' as I said, I find it very awkward and painful, and it destroys the collegial relationship for me to be the keeper of the keys saying, 'Yes,' 'Yes,' 'No, you can't go to that one, but you can.' What I find much fairer is that I figure out how much I can afford for each staff member to travel – at the moment that works out to be about $12,000 a year for each postdoc – and I say at the start of each year, 'You have got $12,000. You can do whatever you want with it, I don't care. If you want to spend it all on page charges, that's fine. If you want to buy a big computer, that's fine. Or if you want to travel, that's fine too. But don't come to me asking if you can go to a conference when you have run out of money. On the other hand, if you decide to save your money you can roll it over to next year.' Not only does that absolve me from having to make a decision every day on who goes to what, but I hope it helps mentor my own staff – teaches them the fiscal issues that they have to track budgets, just as I do, they have to make hard decisions on which conference is going to be most beneficial. Also, if I know everyone is not going over a limit, then I don't have to worry too much about blowing my budget.

Finally, there is a ridiculous number of different bilateral arrangements. Australia seems to have some sort of agreement with almost every country to supply ways of funding visits and collaboration between us and them. If you have got a country you want to work with, Google it and you will probably find a collaborative option.

One example of what I have just said is that astronomers have benefited a huge amount from a reasonably new scheme for strategic research between Australia and India. It was not created with any particular project in mind but it provides a large sum of money for working with our Indian colleagues and has been very successful.

If Germany is your thing, then at least for the Group of 8 universities last year and this year there has been quite a large amount of money to bring German scientists here and to work in Germany. If you are more into Thailand, there are health and science grants for Thailand too. (If any of you are interested, you have got a few more days to get that one in!)

Some of these are not that well advertised, so it is worth looking around. You will find things you didn't know existed.

Then there is the issue of promoting your work to the public. I think you should be pretty shameless about making use of the media machines and the publicity of international organisations. A lot of these impressive organisations like NASA, the NSF and CERN are actually battling with their own governments to justify their existence. Any new science result, even if it is not by an American or a European, is good news for them. They want to prove that their instrument or their facility is worth while, and if you have used some facility of NASA's or of CERN's to get some great result, then they want to know about it. They have whole groups of 15 people who will help you write your press release. Some of them actually are very high-level scientists who have moved into the media; you can just hand them a copy of your paper and you don't have to explain to them what it is about – they will read it and they will write the press release based on it.

A lot of these groups will have very good connections and relationships with the big media outlets, and they can help prepare a whole swathe of educational material, downloads, press kits and all the rest of it.

The movie I am now showing is an example. This star exploded – such things happen all the time, but this one was the brightest explosion ever observed by humans, about three years ago – and NSF produced a very snazzy animation for me which got picked up by the New York Times, CNN and everything else as well. We probably could have done an okay job on this in Australia, but the quality of this animation is very snazzy and it obviously had a lot of cachet.

In recruiting the best people, I think, one should be very proactive. When I go to a conference, I am not just there to listen to the talks and to give my own talk; I am also on the lookout for potential hires. It might not be six months from now, it might not be until five years from now, but my best staff member at the moment – someone who I have actually now got on his own money through a fellowship – is someone I first met in 1999, and for the last five or six years I have been wheedling and begging him, 'Please come to Australia.' Now I have finally got him.

So if you sit at a conference and you see someone young that looks as if they are really good, or they have got potential, then develop that relationship. Mentor them. Even if they are not in your group or they are not your student, they might not have a good relationship with their supervisor or they might just need encouragement to tell them that what they are doing is good – as you would know, a lot of PhD students doubt their ability or their worth. Mentor them, build that relationship, and get them to come to Australia for a visit or a conference, so if it ever comes to offering them a job they don't have to make a decision to move to a country that they have never even seen.

I also think that when it comes to job time, then if you have got a favourite person that you would love to bring to your group, you should not just 'hope' that they will apply for your job. Actually, I would rather have someone come to me on their own money than for me to have to hire them. Find out what fellowships are available – don't expect them to do all the work. They might not know as much as you do. Find out about all the local fellowships that your university or the ARC or the NHMRC have, plus those in their country. The NSF has an international fellowship, so does Japan, so do Europe and the UK. If you think they are good, say, 'You're British. You should apply for a Royal Society fellowship to come to Australia and work with me for three years.' That will also solve the problem of their stepping out of their own country. If you are an NSF fellow, then you are not really leaving the US, even though you are actually working in Australia.

Some of you have non-Australian accents. You know, you come here for a visit and you like the place so much that you stay here. I have many colleagues whom I have convinced to come for a few years and they are all now trying to get permanent residency.

Finally, with regard to staying connected to Australia: if you are overseas, I think it is critical that, as exciting as your overseas institute and overwhelming as the projects that you have got may be, you have to maintain your local collaboration. So get your Australian collaborators involved in the big things you have got going overseas.

Get back often. I meet with amazement people who say, 'I haven't been back for 10 years. I wish I could get a job there.' How can you know what is on offer if you are not getting back there? If you are able to get back, then basically block into your diary every year the annual meeting of your professional society – in my case, the Astronomical Society of Australia. I didn't get there every year, but I basically wrote that in my diary as a sort of one-stop shop: 'In one week I can see everyone and find out everything that is going on in Australia.'

My own particular wagon to push is the idea of return fellowships. There are a lot of Aussies living overseas who are doing well, and there is no way we can get them back. We couldn't offer them enough money, or they don't want to come back. But if you can say, 'Well, why don't we give you a position here where you come back for one month a year?' people are knocking your door down to try and make this happen. We set up such a scheme at the University of Sydney, and we were overwhelmed by the number of applications from dozens of people who we had no idea were Australians, who were desperate to get back and to put something back into the system for a month, a year. They co-supervised students, they went to high schools, one guy was a licensed pilot and actually flew a plane out to country towns in New South Wales to give lectures. You get a huge amount of return from an airfare and a few weeks of living expenses.

There are many return fellowships and visiting fellowships on offer. (This is both for you if you are overseas and also for your buddies and your colleagues if you are trying to get them here.) One of the schemes I helped set up was the Queensland Smart Returns Fellowships scheme, by which each university in Queensland gets to bring back one expat a year for a couple of months, to bring their knowledge back to Queensland. Anyone at Harvard can come to an Australia-Harvard Fellowship. South Australia have their Thinkers in Residence program, which anyone can nominate for. My university has an International Visiting Research Fellowship, and almost all the CSIRO divisions have a visitor program.

So if you are overseas, apply for a visitor program. If there is a big name you would like to get here, be they Australian or not, then get them to apply for it. It has been incredibly beneficial – just to have the world expert in something here for a few weeks is incredible, and the relationship goes way beyond that short visit.

To sum up I have a few overall comments. The international dimension is absolutely crucial. It is not enough just to know, 'Well, I guess I should be going overseas.' You don't know what you're missing. I can't give you a long list of examples, because in each of your fields there is something that you don't even know you are missing out on, that you don't get until you go overseas.

Don't say you have no money. It is expensive to travel, but I believe the funds are out there. Even if you didn't get your grant this year, there are bunches of smaller travelling fellowships and collaborative programs. Look at the web, note the deadlines, and plan ahead.

I think it is a total fallacy to think you can sit here in Australia and do everything by email – it just doesn't work. If you want to recruit and you want to collaborate, then not only do you have to get out there, which can be exhausting, but you should be very proactive about bringing the world to you. Once people set foot in Australia they will always find ways to come back.

Finally, I think working overseas will change your life, be it a result of moving overseas or simply immersing yourself for a few weeks or months in a foreign culture. If you do make that decision, then it really is a conscious and continuous effort to make sure you stay connected to what is happening, and all the great research and science and people back here.

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