(upbeat music)
- I'm the discipline lead
for Agriculture and Food
here at Curtin university,
and I'm also a research leader within
the Center for Crop
and Disease Management.
I've got a very diverse role,
so as part of the discipline lead,
I'm in charge of the teaching team
for both Agriculture and for Food Science.
And then I'm also involved in teaching
of undergraduates and masters students.
And then I have a research
project that I lead as well.
I started off with
research as my first love,
I suppose, and that's why I went
into the job in the first place.
And then really, if you
want to stay in academia,
you have to do some teaching.
And so I started teaching and
found once I got my confidence
that I actually really enjoy it.
And I love seeing the students develop.
I love sort of mentoring
them through the journey,
see them gaining confidence,
and then particularly in agriculture,
because it's quite a closed community,
is then seeing how their career takes off
and how they settle into the industry
and the roles that they have.
STEM skills are pretty
integral into agriculture.
For me personally, I
would use the science,
the technology and the
mathematics part of that.
So obviously my research fits
very clearly into the science.
Technology comes into both
the research and the teaching.
So as part of the teaching,
we're always intending
to introduce students to the
new technology so that when
they go out in the workforce,
they're able to use those,
that they have the skills to
be able to upskill themselves.
Mathematics, underpins agriculture,
you can't get away with it.
And I know a lot of people try
and duck the maths component
because that's perceived
to be the hard part,
but from the farmer working on
the ground to the researcher,
to an agronomist, everybody's using maths,
I'm probably quite unusual,
but I actually really enjoy
the maths part of it,
enjoy the statistics.
One of the thrills of the
research is analyzing it
at the end and just seeing
how well it's worked
and what the answers
are that come out of it
and I think that's always
a really exciting part.
As technology advances,
there's opportunities
and we're starting to see some
of those autonomous tractors,
drones being used by farmers to check
that their water troughs are filled
or sensors on all their gates,
so that if somebody tries to steal
their animals by opening a
gate, then an alarm goes off
and we don't know what the
next 10 years is gonna be.
The technology is evolving so fast
and particularly in agriculture,
I think it's a really
exciting field to be in.
We're teaching them for
jobs that don't exist
using technology that's yet
to be invented with
skills they don't know.
Having confidence in your
ability, a lot of the times so
that when you're given the opportunity
to take those opportunities.
And I think sometimes
particularly when you're younger,
you don't have the
confidence to take them,
even though you're offered them.
Do it (laughs).
If you're thinking about
anything to do with a career
where you don't want to
be stuck in an office,
where you want to have a multitude
of different opportunities,
where you don't really know
what area of science you want to go into,
then agriculture's a really
good area to go into.
It's almost like doing
multidisciplinary science
of the land, you're really
not limiting yourself,
you're opening up your opportunities.
Every student who's graduates,
most of them have jobs before
they even sit their final exams.
You can travel all around the
country and you'll meet people
that you've interacted
with in different projects.
And so it becomes like one big family.
Yeah, it's a lovely place to work.
