AAS | Events | 14-15 February 2008

Michelle Simmons Michelle Simmons spent six years as a Research Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, UK working on quantum electronics. In 1999 she came to Australia where she was a founding member of the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computer Technology. Her research in nanoelectronics is being used to develop novel electronic devices at the atomic scale. She has published numerous papers in refereed journals, a book on nanotechnology and three book chapters on quantum electronics. In 2005 she was awarded the Pawsey Medal by the Australian Academy of Science and in 2006 became the one of the youngest elected Fellows of the Academy.

Good afternoon, everyone. I have to say I was a little hesitant when I was asked to give this talk, because I thought maybe I was a bit too young. But maybe that is the reason why I am giving it, because a lot of these things are still very fresh for me.

What I thought I would do, rather than giving lists and recipes of what it is good to do in your career, is to just go through a little history of my life and try to bring up things that I have learnt along the way and things that have been useful for me. Hopefully, they might be useful for you here.

I am also particularly surprised to be here, because if I went back in time to the 1970s I would never have expected to have been standing here talking to you about the subject of this short talk.

I went to a school in London which can only be described as a very bad school. It was in inner London, a comprehensive school – one of the largest in London. It is famous for two reasons. Boy George, who is from Culture Club – if anybody doesn't know who that is, then I am old enough to be giving this talk; they are an old pop group in London – was actually expelled from the school because he came to school in a black bin-liner as his blazer, and they didn't like that.

The second reason is that a film was actually made about my school, called Clockwise. The advertising poster shows John Cleese in the bath. I can't remember why he is in the bath for that particular film, but essentially the school became famous because the headmaster used to stand on the roof with binoculars during the break times and look at all the people in the playground. Then, if you were being bad, he would call you up at the end of the day on the tannoy system. And that is what John Cleese portrayed in that particular film.

I guess the thing that really affected me the most was that the Inner London Education Authority decided to introduce an independent learning scheme in my A level year, so 16 to 18. They literally came along with a series of books – I was doing experimental science, so for me it was books in maths, chemistry, physics and biology – and lots of boxes with the equipment to do the experiments. The teachers essentially left the classroom and left us to it.

So during that time I learnt to teach myself, and that is quite honest, from picking up the books to opening those boxes ourselves, trying to figure out what was inside and setting up the experiments. So I have come quite a long way from that. But I think that was quite fundamental for me in being a successful researcher: I developed the ability to teach myself and learn things for myself from the ground upwards.

I then went on to the University of Durham, and I have to say that when I first arrived there I went to my academic supervisor, Jim Feast – quite a famous organic chemist in England – and said, 'I think there's been a mistake. I don't think I should be here, because I have come from a very bad school in London.' He said, 'Look, that's exactly the reason you are here. I have come from a very bad school in the north of England, and I've done pretty well. And I expect you to do the same.' He was a good mentor back in those times; he gave me that little bit of hope that actually I could do something really good.

I moved on to do a double degree, physics and chemistry – I couldn't decide what I wanted to do, so I did them both – and I actually found it a joyous time. So whilst most people were trying to skip lectures, I was enjoying being taught for the first time in a few years. And I absolutely loved the practical classes; I excelled at those pretty quickly because I had been learning to do it all myself anyway.

So I did my double degree and did fairly well, and then another experience came along which exemplified something that I have noticed internationally since that time. That is, my supervisor from my final-year honours project encouraged me to stay and do a PhD. At the time, I was naïve and thought that was great, and I guess there was a big carrot that he had there, in that he was going to put an experiment up in space, in the payload of the Shuttle, to grow a crystal in space. And that would be my project for the PhD, to characterise that crystal when it came back down. That was very exciting, and was primarily the reason why I took that PhD and stayed at the same university.

But having now moved on, and having seen very bright people come through the universities that I have been through since, both in Cambridge and here, I now realise that it is actually very good to encourage students to move on. Honours students should, I think, be encouraged to leave the university where they have taken their first degree. That is something I feel very strongly about, but unfortunately not many people seem to practise it. It is much better for the students to move, in my opinion.

Anyway, I stayed there. And sad to say I had another mishap. My supervisor died in a tragic accident between my undergraduate degree and my postgraduate degree, and the crystal experiment went up in space but the crystal actually failed – it never grew properly. So I came back to start my PhD without a supervisor and without a crystal, without a project. I found myself another project and then found myself another supervisor, and was lucky enough to have had a nice scholarship to be able to do that. But again self-teaching and self-awareness were something that came pretty early on in my career.

One thing that I learnt during my successful PhD was again in experimental research, doing all the things myself. I moved on to make solar cells, then I started crystal growth, then processed the crystals and measured them. I set up all the equipment to do each one of those, and felt very strongly that that was important, to be able to have responsibility, to take on each aspect of the learning process and to direct your own research.

Then I moved on to Cambridge, and again that was quite a fascinating experience. I was the first female postdoc in a very large group of about 80 people when I joined it. (It is probably now about 150.) I arrived expecting to be able to grow all my own devices and characterise them, and found that in that group it worked differently. They had three groups of people: those who grew the crystals, those who processed the crystals and those who then measured the devices. I didn't really fit the mould at the beginning, so for the first couple of years I was just put into the growth group and the processing group, and I didn't really like that.

Then I stayed on to do a second postdoc so I could actually measure the devices and direct my own research, and I found that to be something very important. I think that was probably the point in my career where things really changed. I suddenly realised how crucial it was not only to be involved in collaborative research with lots of other people – and to do that quite a lot, to spend quite a bit of time in building that up – but also to have very self-directed research, things that I was in charge of and ultimately responsible for.

The question of doing a second postdoc is something that is obviously a personal choice, and for me it worked particularly well. It was a springboard to a leadership position. It allowed me to solidify the skills base I had so that I could do all those aspects – growth, processing and measurement – but it also meant that during that time I could publish quite widely. In my second three years as a postdoc I literally forced myself to publish. I got into the mode of thinking: 'That is what is going to determine success in the long term. I have to make sure that I am publishing all I am getting, and I have to make sure that I am communicating that to people.' So during that time I also started going to international conferences, and again I have to say that back in the time when I was at Cambridge that was not encouraged at all. So very few of the postdocs there went to international conferences. As a consequence, most of the postdocs that went through the Cambridge system didn't go on to academic careers.

After the stint in Cambridge, I was in a position where I had three choices of where to go. I think a lot of people, particularly in Australia, were quite surprised at the choice that I took. I had a research fellowship to stay in Cambridge, I was shortlisted for an academic position at Stanford, and at exactly the same time the QEII Fellowship offer came through. For me, I think the choice was pretty clear from the outset. The QEII was the one that I took.

Fundamentally, I chose the thing that excited me the most. I also chose the thing that was the biggest risk – the part of my career where, if it worked, it would be very good, and if it didn't work, then I would have to do something very quickly to try and back it up. But also it was a time when I identified an opportunity. One of the things that I see with a lot of young researchers coming through my group is that they tend to like to take the safe option: they want to know what they can do to have a safe academic career. And I basically say to them, 'There is no such thing, and a safe academic career is not really one that you would want to have.' So I do encourage them to take risks.

Since 1999 I have had a QEII Fellowship and a Federation Fellowship. The other reason Australia was a good place compared with the others is that in the other two places it was a very hierarchical system. It would have been very difficult for me to get access to funding and to set up my own group and run an independent program.

Turning to the opportunities, I am going to go over some technical research. The reason being that it is instrumental in the choices that I have made, and I think by going through it you might learn why I made the choice.

Basically, in my PhD I was working on solar cells and one material system. In my postdoc I was looking at completely different materials systems, a gallium arsenide system, and making high-quality transistors. Now what I am doing in Australia is looking at silicon transistors and heading towards single-atom devices.

The reason why I chose that point in my career to come to Australia is known as Moore's Law. Gordon Moore is the co-founder of Intel, and he noticed that the number of chip components on a transistor doubled roughly every 18 months. That has been going now for three or four decades, and it is what the semiconductor industry is led by, essentially. So they put in multi-trillions of dollars every year to maintain this law.

In about 2005–07, the feature size of a transistor was about 65–100 nanometres. For that law to be maintained, the feature size has to keep getting smaller and smaller. And if you project that 10 years down the track to 2020, we will basically be at the point where the feature size of transistors is down at the level of single atoms.

What was interesting was that back in the 1990s and early 2000s, when people started noticing that this law existed (it is an empirical law, not a physical law) a lot of people started bailing out, saying that silicon was going to come to an end and really everyone should start doing different material systems. So people jumped into gallium arsenide transistors, people started looking at molecular electronics and carbon nanotubes, going on towards DNA, and basically trying out different materials systems.

One of the things I felt quite strongly was that the silicon industry have got such a huge backing economically that they weren't just going to throw it away. I thought, 'Well, hang on a minute. They're going to keep going, down to the level of single atoms. They're going to push it as hard as they can go,' and the research that I was doing in Cambridge was starting to build devices at the atomic level, in gallium arsenide systems. So I could see that I had an expertise in single-atom technology, and I could see that silicon was a material of the future, even though a lot of people were bailing out, and also at that time in Australia there was an idea of starting up a project in quantum computation. So my skills fit very well with the absence of skills in Australia. Basically, at that time there were very few people that had the skills in ultra high vacuum systems, such as crystal growth and scanning tunnelling microscopy, the ability to move those single atoms.

So when I came here I felt I had something to give, as well as something to take, and that was another reason for moving.

When I got here I was consciously aware that you have got this big change from England to Australia – somebody told me when I first arrived here, 'You're going to be judged very quickly on how quickly you change and how quickly you publish in this new field.' So I knew the pressure was on. Even though it was a change in career direction, there really is in research, in my belief, no timetable break. So you really have to keep going. You can't just stop and say, 'Well, people can expect me to have a dip in my publications for a few years.' I actually think that's not a wise process; you really have to push yourself to believe that you can't afford a dip there.

As a consequence, during my QEII Fellowship I maintained the research that I was doing in Cambridge, so I could still work with them collaboratively and take samples from them to measure here and still publish in that, but I also moved very quickly to try and get results here as fast as I could.

The result came out a few years after getting here; it was published in 2003, so that makes it 2002. We could for the first time start to place atoms in silicon with atomic precision, and that that was the first stage towards building something like a quantum computer, which (if you could realise it) would have this exponential increase in computational power. So it was a very exciting topic internationally.

During that time, quite naïvely but just naturally, I realised that that was a very exciting result. Nobody else had been able to manipulate atoms in a semiconductor, and no-one else was thinking of making devices at the single-atom level, so this was completely new technology. I was very excited about it, and I ended up going around Australia giving lots of talks, and then internationally. In particular, I started going to schools, and I found that when I talked to schoolchildren they were unbelievably excited about the results. So they had the same excitement, I guess, that I had. They understood that it was at the cutting edge, and I came to realise they could understand things at quite a deep level. So I didn't water a lot of it down.

It was the enthusiasm partly from them, and from the other researchers as I went round, that made me realise that what we were doing was very good, so it was a self-generating process. But I realise it is very important to be able to describe those results in a fairly concise manner, and really highlight the impact of the results and the outcomes that you would get from doing that kind of research.

The success of that work allowed me to apply for more grants to go to international conferences and to start to build international relations. It was around that time people started contacting me and asking whether they could work with my group to see if they could measure some of these devices with us.

That was the first stage in get a good result that was worth while. So now the question was how to go further. That was essentially just moving an atom inside a semiconductor to put it where you wanted, but building a device was a whole new ballgame. I realised very quickly that to build the device was going to be a much bigger project and that the equipment we had in Australia at that time was just not going to make it.

So I immediately started contacting various suppliers of equipment to see if we could redesign things to make a system that would do what we needed; to do that I would have to get more lab space and build up the lab to put the new equipment in. That was quite a lesson for me: setting up lab space is probably one of the hardest things you have to do in an Australian or any university, I think. The other thing that I would never have expected myself to be doing was going along to the necessary meetings. It took about 15 months of meetings every week with a group of people around a table to go through all the different things that you needed to build the lab. We had acoustics engineers, plumbers, airconditioning engineers, the whole lot, in there along with the architect and the heads of the university departments.

That was a heck of a lot of fun, I have to say. It took a long time, with a huge amount of detail to be taken in, but it was a very rewarding process.

Then, having got the lab, we needed the equipment. Again, to get big pieces of equipment in Australia means that you have to go in with multiple partners, so I immediately started looking toward different equipment grants, and went for a joint linkage application for one system. We also got funding for a separate system from the federal government and from the state government in order to get this machine – it is a $3.5 million machine, so it is quite a lot of money. But essentially what we got within the first three years of my being here was the money towards getting that system.

This allowed us to go on from just moving atoms in devices to actually making whole devices all the way through.

There were a lot of things I learnt on this process too. To buy that kind of expensive equipment, you have to spend a lot of time talking to the people you are going to buy it from, and the relationship with them is crucial. At the end of the day, you are going to be left with a $3.5 million piece of equipment that you want to last for 20 years, and for that to occur those suppliers have to be your really good friends and know (a) that you are going to do good work that they can use to publicise their equipment, which is what we have done quite heavily, but also (b) that you can continue to buy more equipment from them, which we have done: we have bought another system since then.

I look back and realise that I probably had over 1500 phone calls and emails with this supplier, because there were two different suppliers that we worked together with to build the system over a period of about two years in order to get that system on board, and several visits to Germany to get under way.

The awareness of the long-term reliability and service contracts is something also that you can't underestimate if you have got an experimental group, because ultimately if your systems don't work, your people are not happy – and that's a disaster.

To build a research team was a matter of funding, so I spent a huge amount of time applying for different funds. There are an awful lot of funds out there. It seems that people tend to think of funding just from ARC [Australian Research Council], but there is a lot of funding in DEST [Department of Education, Science and Training], the university have internal funds and obviously you can go international.

To come back to communication: I realise that doing those seminars across the country when I first arrived in Australia – and have carried on doing – really gave me access to good students and other good people that wanted to come and work with me.

Advertising internationally: I would say probably more than 70 per cent of my group is international, so people have come from overseas. This is again something that I take very seriously, and I try to do that on a regular basis, not just when I have an ARC grant but when I think there might be a changeover of people, which happens quite a lot, to make sure that there is somebody else to come in.

The interviewing process: I guess most people here would know that it is important to contact the referees and have multiple interviews with the person that you are going to hire. Having a successful research team is having people that get on well together, and that is not always easy to ensure. Having said that, I have a very good research team. I think it is partly because I spend a lot of time interviewing them and checking references.

International relations is something that has really taken off for me over the last three or four years, particularly since I got the Federation Fellowship.

Very early on I realised that it is essential to be aware of what other people are doing internationally in the same area as you and, in particular, to make sure that you talk to those people. In Cambridge I was quite surprised that they were very competitive: they didn't talk to the people they were competing with. Whilst I was in Cambridge I went to the competing group in Japan, the NTT group, and found that they were incredibly receptive to collaboration. They didn't like the competition at all. From that experience I have realised that it is good to go and talk to the people you are competing with, because in general the fields that we are in aren't particularly narrow, and if you can work with them, the more people that can address the problem and discuss it, the greater the benefit to the field itself. So that is something that I have continued to do throughout my career.

It is really crucial to know what is going on. So I read the literature all the time, and I have little group sessions where I get my students to go through the literature so we all can keep up to date with it. And that is probably one of the weakest things I have found in other groups, that they don't keep watching where the literature is going. It is through doing that, that I have also made new collaborations. When I have seen somebody who is about to enter the field in a slightly unusual way and might be good with us, I have spoken to them. Through that now I have got lots of international groups that I am getting joint funding with, in other countries, to work with them.

I have maintained the link with the Cambridge group that I was in last, and that has led to lots of joint publications which are continuing, even though I left in 1999.

The other thing I have done is that when I go to international conferences I don't just go to the conference and come back; I actually make sure I go and visit at least four or five groups, so that each time it is not just one conference, there are several meetings set up. On one visit I did to the US in 2001 I had 17 flights in 20 days: I flew around and visited lots of people and saw lots of good groups. I still collaborate with some of those people, even though I just went to see them and see what they were up to, and to give a seminar. I have some sort of joint funding with most of the groups that I am working with.

For me, it all comes down to the research team: they have to be happy. If they are happy, then they work well. That is the biggest lesson I have learnt of all. And to keep them happy takes a lot of time and energy, so I do have lots of meetings with them. I have individual meetings every week with them, I meet with them in small groups to address specific problems that I know they are worried about, and then we have large meetings as well so that the whole team knows what everybody else is doing. A huge amount of my time now does go into group meetings, discussing problems with them, having little sessions, and also having the little seminars where they keep abreast of the literature – and celebrating their successes. Whenever we get a paper out, we try and have some kind of cake or tea together, so that everyone knows that that paper has come out.

I have learnt about maintaining their happiness in their work. I have looked at myself and realised that what would make me happy would be to know I was doing well and achieving. As a consequence, what I tend to do is get their CV out with them on a regular basis and go through it, and see that their CV is growing with time. This involves looking at their career structure, making sure that they are nominated for awards, publishing enough, applying for fellowships if they can – that is something I am very strong on, so if they can get independent fellowships, as soon as I sense that they are in the ballgame to do that, I get them to apply – and making sure that they are independent and responsible. That has worked out, I think, pretty well.

The other thing is to make sure that they go on to good positions, and again that is something that takes a lot of time. I didn't expect to be doing that, but I do spend an awful lot of time talking to people and making sure that they do go to good places. So a lot of the people from my group have gone to faculty positions or off to industry, or to good universities overseas. That perpetuates and basically helps new people come to the group all the time, because they hear that it is a good group to go to.

I was asked to bring 'motherhood' in, and I don't really know how to bring it in so I will just say how it happened with me.

Throughout my career I didn't think about having children. I was doing what I love and trying to do it as best I could, and that meant working very long hours. So having children wasn't something that was on my mind a lot. But then in 2002 I met the 'right' person – that is the crucial point. If you meet the right person, then it tends to happen. So in 2003 I had my first child, and I have had two more since then.

I have talked to lots of visiting female academics and postdocs in my group. For example, I had a 36-year-old female postdoc recently who came through my group and had not yet had children, although she did want to have children. I suddenly felt a responsibility to say to her that she really didn't have a heck of a lot of time left. She was in the same kind of mindset that I had been, 'Well yes, it's okay. I've got the good career, I'm going somewhere, I'm very happy.' That is the dilemma for female academics: when do you have children? I have talked to lots of females in the field about how they have done it, and a general trend is to have children very early on, during their PhD or first postdoc, to take time out and then it has been incredibly hard for them to get back in and reap the rewards of their hard work. When I say 'incredibly hard', I mean that I haven't seen anyone that has done it successfully and go up the ladder as fast as those who haven't had children – that is, anyone that I personally know. (That is not to say that it hasn't happened.)

A lot of the women that I have seen, certainly in the university I am at, that have taken time out to have children, and have come back into teaching positions, essentially, and never been able to go up the ladder as if they hadn't had children. On their return they have been overloaded with teaching and administration, so they really have lost a lot of their research careers.

The successful ones that I have seen have put their research first, either because they haven't met the right person or because they chose it, have had a very successful research career and then have had children later on in life. I guess there is a dilemma there – and I don't have an answer to people. When I got my Federation Fellowship in 2003, two female professors of physics got it in the same year and both happened to have children (in addition to me). I was relatively shocked to hear comments from people saying, 'Oh look, this is no good. These female scientists are getting Federation Fellowships and then using them to have children.' I felt that was incredibly unfair, because those people had reached the late 30s in their lives, where they really didn't have much of a choice if they were going to have children, and I guess they had sacrificed a lot to get to the point where they could get a Federation Fellowship.

The other thing that has had a significant impact on me is that there was very little access to childcare. It took me four years to get into the university childcare with my first child, and that is something that is a very clear equation. If there is no childcare for female researchers who are going to be breastfeeding for a year or whatever it is, then it will impact their careers and it will make a big difference. So childcare has to change, in my opinion. At the University of New South Wales, male and female academics have equal access to childcare, but it is heavily debated at the moment as to whether that should be the case or not.

Anyway, cognisant of the fact that I had heard those comments about female Federation Fellows just having children, I felt even more responsibility not to have a dip in my research career, and to make sure that during my Federation Fellowship there was no lack in publications or quality of publications during that time. So I worked even harder, having had children. I went back to work after six weeks with my first child, and after two weeks with my second and third children.

My plan there, really, was to make sure that the publications didn't dip. I had 14 publications in the year when my first child was born, and I had a career high the next year. That makes me laugh, because when I was on the ARC panel one of the other female academics there said to me that when she had children, her publication record actually went up, because she became much better at managing her time. So I thought I would see if I could do it, and I did in that particular year.

But obviously it is also good to make sure that the quality is high. Someone also recently said to me that you're only as good as your last publication, and that I think is something that is also very true. So I work incredibly hard to make sure the quality is there.

So how do you do it all? I don't have an answer – all I know is what I do. I guess the first thing is that you have to work incredibly hard. There is no way around it. If I have any sense of a graduate student coming through doing an honours project who says, 'Oh, yeah, I want to become an academic,' then I say, 'Are you prepared to work really hard?' If they say, 'Well, yeah, I can work hard,' I tell them, 'You're not going to make it' – because you really have to work hard. That is the key, I think, to my success, just to work as hard as I can, to make sure that I do everything that I can do with the time that I have.

I have always seized opportunities, and that is linked to looking after the health of your discipline. I have felt and feel the pain that physics suffers at the moment, where a lot of school teachers, for example, are teaching physics but are not trained in physics. As a consequence, a lot of the young children that I know would be very enthusiastic to do fundamental science are being put off at a very early age. That comes through to university as well, so by the time they get through to an honours course in physics they generally are very enthusiastic but there aren't that many of them. So I do worry about the health of physics internationally – it is happening everywhere – and as a consequence I try and get involved in the Australian Institute of Physics and in the National Committee for Physics of the Australian Academy of Science, and I go to schools and talk about science, particularly to high school children.

Another thing that I feel is quite important is to be flexible with time. I used to be in the mindset where if I had to write a grant I had to have a week or two clear; I didn't have anyone interrupting me, so that I could write my grant – or likewise with a paper. Now I have realised that with a big group, with lots of things going on, I don't have my previous flexibility any more. It just doesn't exist. And I have got to the point now where, if I have a couple of hours and I am in between things, I just get down and start writing. I am not so precious about making it perfect the first time; I know I can always come back and iterate it. And I think that is a big lesson that I have learnt. Five years ago I would have insisted that I have this free head-space to be able to write things, and now I literally just get on with the time that I do have.

I think it is also crucial for an academic to make sure that they keep abreast of the literature; that they keep reading and writing. I have seen a lot of people move into more administration and management roles within a research group and really lose the ability to think and write; they just rely on their team to do that for them. That is something that again I feel very strongly about. There was a talk earlier today about how important communication is, and I believe it is absolutely crucial. To do any kind of scientific research you need to be able to communicate it so that it gets out there.

Going for lots of walks is something that I do, just to clear my head. I have endless lists and I just work through them all the time.

I guess the bottom line is a double-edged sword: accept that you can only do your best. Quite often I feel that I haven't done enough, even though I have spent many hours working. So that is something that I have had to deal with, to accept that I can only do what I can do. But I do always try to ensure that I do my best.

Without my research team, I wouldn't be here today, so I thank them and the funding agencies.

Discussion

Question: You said 'work extremely hard'. I certainly agree; I wish I could find out someone's work ethic before I take them on. But is that the same thing as 'work long hours'? I am really torn by all the things you said – to keep the publication record up and make sure you are staying on top of things – but on the other hand is it really worth it to get a good paper out if it means coming home when your kids are already in bed, or missing important moments in their life?

Michelle Simmons: That is a very good point. Life is all about balance, and I have to say that for me it is a continual struggle to get the balance right. So I have set things that I do. I can go to work as early as I like in the morning, but I have to be home by 6 – and when I say 'as early as I like', sometimes that can be 2 am, so I mean it literally. For me, I look at the things that I have to do, I look at the people that are relying on me doing those things, and I just make sure they get done on time. That means I will start very early, but I have those rules where I am home at 6 every day, no matter what, and Saturdays are sacred.

But yes, it is a balance, and who knows whether I have got it right. It feels right for me at the moment but I am continually changing it, and reassessing it. I think as the children grow older they are going to have different needs and no doubt I will be continually assessing it as that happens.

You are right, and I don't know. But I think if you are doing well and you are happy, and your family is happy, then you must be doing okay.

Question: How do you balance the need for continuous publication against this laboratory that takes two years to set up to do your next experiment?

Michelle Simmons: I think in the way that I tried to describe: having collaborative work is one thing that I do, but also recognising that with all the experimental research that we do, it is building up to a process. There are parts of that process that can be broken down very easily into publications which are good for the students to get themselves. So, with a student in the first year of their PhD, I try and get them to aim for two papers within their first year. Having lots of people in the group, pressuring them to publish, which is good for them and not just for me – it is actually essential for them to do that – and making sure that I collaborate with other people, so that I am always working on many projects, is one way that I have avoided having those career dips.

I think a lot of that comes from just working hard, making sure that all those things are moving and not letting them drop.

Graham Farquhar: I know what I am about to say is a private matter, and you and your husband keep your lives separate, but the extraordinary thing for those of us who know you both is that your husband is Thomas Barlow, who has been a ministerial science adviser. So it is not as if you have a complacent husband. When you say, Michelle, that you picked the 'right' person, I really am intrigued by that. Philip Kuchel and I would say that we would like to see you both managing twins, because that is normally terminal! But looking at what you have done, I think you would manage it standing on your head. I am in full admiration of you and I think we are all a bit awestruck.

Please join with me in thanking Michelle for giving us her time today. It has been wonderful.

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