As a child, Dr Camilla Pang noticed that the other kids seemed to be coded differently to her. They knew what was expected of them from teachers, and how to follow the unspoken rules of the playground. She recalls there was a “smoothness” to their interactions that she couldn’t feel.
But when she pored over her uncle’s collection of science books, it all made sense. Pang found comfort and connection in their ideas, laws and patterns and, in time, they became the foundation for a personal ‘user manual’ that she created to explain the human behaviour around her.
“I didn’t know what this feeling of ‘smoothness’ felt like until I read my uncle’s science books,” she says. “Reading about the elements of the world, how they interact, looking at the pictures and the diagrams … I finally had that feeling of smoothness for these books!”
Pang, an author and computational biologist based in London, turned this manual into memoir about how she’s used principles from biology, chemistry and physics to make sense of social norms, relationships and emotions. Published in 2020, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships, earned Pang the Royal Society Prize for Science Books that year, making her the youngest author, and first person of colour, to win the prize to date.
Every friction that you feel as a neurodiverse person is valid, and that isn’t because you’re wrong – it’s because you’re there to design a new world.
Since her debut success, Pang went on to publish Perfectly Weird, Perfectly You, a guide to embracing individuality for young adults, and Breakthrough, which explores what scientists can teach us about the process of discovery.
A self-described “systems thinker”, Pang approaches challenges by looking at the big picture, recognising relationships, patterns and feedback loops, rather than just focusing on individual parts. As an author, she wants to help people feel more secure as part of the larger social system we inhabit – a place that can be isolating and daunting for anyone, but particularly the neurodiverse.
As a speaker and media performer, she celebrates the joy of science and the power of neurodiversity as a “hidden treasure of human evolution”. In her TED talk, On Being Weird, Pang describes difference as “an unorthodox blessing and a potential to create change”.
A manual for the “unwritten rules”
Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at the age of eight and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at 26, Pang has written about feeling “like a stranger within my own species”. When she was five, she asked her mother if there was a guidebook that explained human behaviour.
“My mother Sonia is an artist, and my dad Peter is a scientist. My parents never saw me as a child with ‘symptoms’, but as someone struggling and who needed a specific type of help. They didn’t parent me based on what I should be, but on who I was, and helped me adapt to the world and vice versa. I never felt demonised. It was very much the place of acceptance, which I think was crucial,” says Pang.
“Now that I’ve written Explaining Humans and it’s been out for a while, I’ve actually realised that I wrote it for my mum … to explain to her what happened in my childhood, and as a thank you for being an essential part of this story.”
Kindness and humility are literally the secret ingredients to being a neuroinclusive.
Through primary and secondary school, Pang explored links between the scientific principles and the behaviour of the humans in her orbit and discovered surprising and comforting connections. Game theory offered her social etiquette clues, while cancer cells modelled collaboration behaviours better than team-building exercises ever could. Machine learning provided insight into decision-making and the tyranny of perfectionism could be understood through the laws of thermodynamics.
These insights became the basis for Explaining Humans, which Pang pitched to a publisher while completing her PhD at University College London in 2019. With its unique premise and broad appeal, it was quickly accepted and published in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time of tragedy and uncertainty, Pang says, and one that altered the relationship between science and society.
“It’s interesting to hear people now respect science on a different level, but also question it. It highlighted that science isn’t just a solution space, but an adaptive inquiry, which is why I wrote my third book, Breakthrough,” says Pang. The book explores uncertainty, failure and discovery – familiar pandemic themes – through the lens of cutting-edge science.
Pivoting to solve problems
As a computational biologist at a large pharmaceutical company, Pang has created algorithms to automate part of the drug-discovery process, in an effort to reduce the strain on labs. But she was worried about the energy cost of running the artificial intelligence (AI).
“Something about it felt off,” she wrote on her Substack. “That the best of my efforts was to be ‘less bad’, which isn’t the same as being ‘more good’.”
So, Pang is exploring the possibility of a career pivot, to use systems thinking to create more positive big-picture environmental outcomes. She’s championing the idea of ‘pivot heroes’ – people who leave one field to solve problems in another – not as “quitters”, but as “brave minds that position themselves to solve greater problems and have changed fields dramatically”.
She’s also working to make the worlds of study and work more welcoming and positive for neurodiverse people, many of whom she concedes can find themselves in a “dark place”, struggling to connect with the world around them – a world that Pang knows will benefit from their unique thinking.
“I say this a lot in my talks, but it’s useful; if you’re challenged by the system, then that’s literally a reminder that you’re there to make a new one,” she says. “Every friction that you feel as a neurodiverse person is valid, and that isn’t because you’re wrong – it’s because you’re there to design a new world.”
Pang says her own employer has been inclusive and supportive and encouraged her to build a community in which neurodiverse employees can talk freely about their needs. She is keen to dispel any taboos around talking about neurodiversity, and champions initiatives that help autistic people feel safe and seen in the workplace.
While she welcomes greater advocacy for the neurodiverse and for ‘pivot heroes’ like herself, as well as inclusion programmes and specialist teacher training in schools and workplaces, Pang believes that one simple approach can be a game-changer for people with neurodivergent minds: kindness.
“For me, the most effective teachers were the kindest,” she says. “Kindness and humility are literally the secret ingredients to being a neuroinclusive. It isn’t just about knowing the ins and outs of neurodiversity; it’s being a good human and helping someone that quite literally can’t help themselves.”
Story by Michelle Fincke