Dr. Catherine Fargher is an AWGIE award-winning scriptwriter, leader and creative focused on combining storyworlds, and characters with interactivity.

Catherine is passionate about harnessing the power of storytelling to deliver educational content, including STEM, English, and more, through innovative methodologies and interactive media.

Catherine founded Dr Egg Adventures in February 2012. The Dr. Egg Adventures Laboratory creates engaging Education Technology (EduTech) products and content to solve problems faced by primary school teachers and educators in STEM and AI driven futures.

Catherine works closely with advisory board members and the Macquarie University Incubator to re-invent the world of the Dr. Egg Adventures brand and business into what it is today.

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @DrEggAdventures    | Facebook: @dreggadventures | Instagram: @dreggadventures

Kim is a professional archivist and historian and is the Head of Historical Services for Westpac Group. She contributed to the book produced for the Bank’s 200th Anniversary, and also arranged for the listing of the Bank’s earliest records – dating from 1816 – on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Kim’s 25-year career has been spent principally in the private sector, with community-based organisations, businesses, religious orders and independent schools.

Kim holds a Bachelor degree in Communications from UTS, and a Master of Information Management from UNSW. She is currently working towards her doctorate at ACU, focussing recordkeeping in the private sector, particularly in relation to the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse. A former President of the Australian Society of Archivists (2006 -2008) and member of the Executive Board of the International Council on Archives (2009 – 2012), Kim was one of the authors of the Universal Declaration on Archives, which was adopted by UNESCO in 2011. A passionate advocate of records, archives and the stories they hold, Kim has also written a number of award-winning publications, including the centenary history of North Sydney Boys’ High School, and In Good Faith: Waverley College and the Great War. She also writes for the profession, with a number of journal articles and industry-standard text books to her credit.

Kim is also proud mother of a 17 year old, and the only daughter of accidental migrants from Germany.

A short message to let you know when you can expect the next episode featuring Kim Eberhard, Head of Historical Services, Westpac Group. 

Dr Melanie Zeppel is a Data Scientist and Researcher. Melanie's multi-disciplinary research spans experimental design and modelling impacts of customer user experience, climate change, as well as genomic medicine, including childhood cancer and other conditions.

Melanie has recently made the transition from academia to a role as a Data Analyst in the corporate sector and couldn't be happier!

My guest this month on the ResourcefulHDR podcast is Dr. Alison Rice, Deputy Director of the Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform at CSIRO.  I met Alison through the magic of Twitter and she kindly agreed to share her story.

After completing a Bachelor of Science with Honours from the University of Adelaide, Alison worked as a Research Assistant … at this stage, Alison said she could not have imagined doing a PhD. Alison went to the UK and Europe as part of a fact-finding mission and only decided to undertake a PhD when she received encouragement from several people. Alison competed her PhD in Biological Sciences in French and English at the University of Bordeaux II in France.

When Alison returned to Australia her career led her into roles working as a Senior Research Scientist leading research groups. Alison’s work focused on new therapeutic options for the complications of haematopoietic stem cell transplantation in Medical Research Institutes in Sydney and Brisbane respectively.

In 2012, Alison made the successful transition to a career in Research Development, incorporating research policy, research management and business development at Griffith University. In 2018, Alison took up a role as a Principal Policy Officer in Queensland Health focusing on bringing content specific knowledge about research to Government to enhance import and export opportunities for Queensland’s health and medical research sector. In 2019, Alison was appointed as the Deputy Director of the Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform at CSIRO. This strategic position aims to help build a vibrant synthetic biology research and development community to drive the bio-based industries of the future.

The story of how Alison ended up in her current role illustrates the value of networks and that, through good relationships, unexpected opportunities can arise.

My guest on the ResourcefulHDR podcast his month is Dr. Rebecca Gelding. Rebecca recently started a new job as Project Officer (ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Familes over the Life Course)

Rebecca speaks about her research, her career choices and how important it is to stay true to herself.

Rebecca’s award-winning PhD thesis investigated what is going on in the brain as people imagine musical pitch and rhythm. Her research has featured on ABC's All in the Mind Podcast, ABC Classic and ABC Science, and in 2019 she presented at the sold-out TEDx Macquarie University,  and had the audience on their feet singing. Earlier this year she even played Chopsticks on the Steinway & Sons piano in City Recital Hall in front of a live lunchtime audience all in the name of science communication.

I began following Rebecca when she was still doing her PhD and as a result saw that she was going to be ia guest on the ABC Radio Sydney and so I tuned in to hear about her fascinating research. I was then lucky enough to be in the audience for her talk at TEDx Macquarie University in September last year.  Rebecca’s TEDx talk has now had over 540000 views!

You can also read Rebecca's posts Music on the Mind blog created during her PhD and listen to the PioneeringMinds podcast

Kate holds a PhD in dance  theatre  and disability from Macquarie University titled 'Performances of 'Care': Dance Theatre by and with Australian Artists with Disability'. She teaches across Performance Studies, Cultural Studies and Media Studies at Macquarie University, the University of Sydney and the University of Technology, Sydney. She has held various arts administration positions, currently at Ausdance NSW as Projects & Programs Manager, and prior to this at Critical Path. To date, one of her most challenging and exhilarating experiences was interning at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival for the 2009 season in Massachusetts USA. Kate continues her research collaborating with independent artists and scholars alike as well as organisations including the Sydney Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems and the International Federation for Theatre Research’s ‘Performance and Disability’ Working Group of which she is a co-convenor. A dancer at heart, Kate has most of her fun hanging out and working with others.

n.b. The book Kate mentions at the end of the podcast is called ... ‘The Relationship is the Project – Working with Communities by Jade Lillie

After completing a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney in 1992, Daniel worked in a variety of jobs – as a storeman with David Jones and Grace Bros before travelling overseas to the USA and Europe and then around Australia. On returning to Sydney, Daniel took up a job with the NSW Department of Sport & Recreation as a Swimming Teacher which led him to undertake a Graduate Diploma of Education (Primary) in 1997 at the University of Wollongong. Following the Grad Dip Ed, Daniel relocated to New Zealand in 1998 to take up a teaching position at Ruapotaka Primary school Auckland where he taught for 12 months before returning to Sydney where he taught at Holy Family Primary School late East Granville from 2000 to 2006 and then at St. Agatha’s Primary School at Pennant Hills.

Realising that Primary teaching was not the best fit, Daniel decided to return to University to complete Bachelor of Marine Science at Macquarie University in 2009 followed by a PhD in Biological Sciences in 2011, graduating in 2017. Daniel’s PhD thesis was “Direct and indirect impacts of a non-native predator: foraging by Carcinus maenas on native bivalves of south-east Australian estuaries” Daniel now works as the Curriculum Co-ordinator at Parramatta Marist High School where he was formerly the Head of Mathematics, Statistics and Data and he couldn’t be happier.

Dr Jacqueline Mackaway is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University (MU). For the past 4 years she has taught a social research unit which requires students to undertake an internship. Previously, she has worked with MQ’s Professional and Community Engagement (PACE) initiative, providing scholarly underpinning for pedagogy in this area. 

Jacqueline’s research interests cover the sociology of education and work, and she recently completed a PhD focused on equitable student access to work-integrated learning. Prior to her time in higher education, Jacqueline spent 15 years working as a human resource professional across a range of sectors including government, not-for-profit and large multi-nationals.