By Sue White
Name: Natalie Trevaskis
The profession: Scientist and lecturer
The organisation: Monash University
The job title: Associate professor
The pay: $175,772 salary as an associate professor at Monash, plus a $30,000 salary bonus for being a highly cited researcher. Also earns royalties from patents as well as payments for consultancy, which vary each year.
Associate professor Natalie Trevaskis in a lab at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Credit: Ryan Wheatley
6am: I do my best work shortly after I wake up. I think about scientific ideas, write, revise or review scientific papers or reports, or write grants to get funding for ideas or prepare talks. Sometimes, I have consultancy calls to international pharmaceutical companies at this time. I finish up with breakfast and emails before the utter chaos of getting kids ready for school begins.
7:30am: My job has many different parts and so does my family life. I have four kids and a husband who is an anaesthetist. Before school, I’m making four lunchboxes, looking for lost socks and uniforms, instruments and sports gear. Something is always lost and someone’s shoes are always missing from the designated shoe rack.
9am: No day is the same for me, which keeps things interesting. Today, I have time for some more deep-thinking work (and coffee!). Currently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the lymphatic vessels in our skeletal muscle.
I’m considering how they may play a role in muscle repair following injury, illness or with age and how we can fix that to keep people active, working and out of nursing homes and hospitals. When I finish, I take a quick break to go running. I try to move regularly throughout the day.
11am: Today I deliver a lecture to Bachelor of Pharmacy students: I’m teaching them about drug delivery, formulation and pharmacokinetics. Our students are the pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists of the future, and it’s critical that they are prepared to meet the demands of Australia’s healthcare system and tackle major and evolving global health challenges.
On other days, this slot might be filled with meetings with our lymph prodrug team or the mRNA team, looking at new data, deciphering it and deciding what to do next.
Our lymph prodrug team, for example, were the inventors of a drug delivery platform called “Glyph”, which essentially harnesses the body’s lymphatic system to enable drugs to be administered as a simple pill, as opposed to lengthy and expensive intravenous infusions.
Very excitingly for our team, Glyph has recently become the basis to a new Boston-based biopharmaceutical company called Seaport Therapeutics, which specialises in neuropsychiatric medicines in areas of high unmet patient needs including depression and anxiety disorders.
12pm: Over lunch, I might wander into the lab, where our scientists are preparing their samples for analysis. These days I don’t spend a lot of time doing hands on [lab] work. I miss that.
1pm: Next up is a meeting for Her Research Matters (HRM). I’m currently co-chair of this grassroots-driven, outcome-focused collective. It’s a Monash project that has been running since 2019, aiming to promote, sponsor, and foster an inclusive and equitable leadership environment so women in academia can reach their full potential.
This work is so important. More than half of science PhD graduates and early career researchers are women, but they make up only 17 per cent of senior scientists in Australian universities and research institutes. HRM has greatly enhanced the culture in our faculty, and we have seen more women rise to be professors and leaders as a result.
2pm: I still have several more appointments, as each fortnight I meet individually with each of the PhD and honours students and post-doctoral fellows in our lab. We discuss their data, progress, plans and big ideas, and I give them encouragement and feedback on their work, including their presentations and written pieces.
4pm: One last email check! As long as it’s not a Monday, when our whole lab meets, it’s off home to pick up kids for some more chaos: swimming, gymnastics, soccer, tennis or badminton.
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