Darren Saunders is an award-winning science communicator and the new Deputy Chief Scientist & Engineer in the Office of the NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer.
He may be a biomedical scientist at heart, but so much of Darren Saunders’ award-winning career has been about building bridges – in particular, bridges between scientists and the wider community.
In 2023, Saunders was appointed as the Deputy Chief Scientist & Engineer in the Office of the NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer, a role in which he will contribute to policy decisions through independent reports and reviews requested by NSW Government ministers.
“I’m really looking forward to drawing on all of my skills and experience in research, industry, policy and communications,” says Saunders. “I’m excited and a little intimidated by the challenge, and optimistic about the opportunity to contribute to difficult policy problems.”
It’s a logical next career step for the researcher and communicator, who has spent much of the past decade or so bridging the gap between academia and lay audiences. While wearing one hat as researcher and academic at various institutes including UNSW, The Garvan Institute and the University of Sydney, Saunders has been a regular guest on shows such as ABC’s The Drum and Channel 7’s Daily Edition.
Because of his high-profile media presence, Saunders often finds himself on talk shows where scientific research is barely mentioned – it could be a discussion on foreign affairs or the economy. But these opportunities can be particularly valuable, he says.
“I have a very clear strategy on those programs to show people how a scientist thinks,” says Saunders. “I come to the discussion with the evidence, and I present it in an analytical way, like how a scientist would look at a problem. It’s a way of showing people, ‘This is how science works as a process, regardless of what the subject matter is’.”
It was this work that saw him win the 2019 Celestino Eureka Prize for Promoting Understanding of Science. The award recognised Saunders’ role in making evidence-based science accessible to the general public.
“Around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was getting asked a lot to come on television or radio to help people understand this crazy, rapidly changing situation with lots of unknowns,” says Saunders. “It really brought into focus for me the importance of being comfortable with uncertainty. It’s still possible to function and to make decisions even if you aren’t 100% certain about what you’re doing.”
In fact, says Saunders, embracing uncertainty is at the heart of how a scientist operates. “We sort of ‘swim around’ in uncertainty,” he says. “We find pockets of things that we’re more or less sure about, but it’s kind of the nature of science to operate in that space. So, I figured out that it was really important for people like me to show the public, ‘This is how I deal with uncertainty,’ or ‘This is the way I go about decision-making’. An inherent feature of science is that things change. We find new evidence and we change our thinking. We change our theories and our ideas, and that’s okay.”
New directions
Throughout his academic career, Saunders has demonstrated the kind of flexibility in his approach to research that he uses in his media appearances. Around 2015, he made the unusual decision to broaden his specialisation from cancer research to include neuroscience.
“In my own research group, we were working on the fundamental mechanisms of how cells make and break the proteins – essentially, how they fold them up, degrade them, and recycle them,” says Saunders. “[I was] looking at various parts of those systems to understand mostly breast cancer, but also pancreatic cancer, and how the metabolic pathways in cancer cells work differently to the metabolic pathways in normal cells.”
He recalls chatting with a friend and fellow scientist with a deep personal connection to Motor Neurone Disease, and the two of them realised that their research had a surprising amount of common ground. “We’d developed some technical innovations in my lab that allowed us to look at this disease in really great detail,” says Saunders. “It turns out that this was also quite useful looking in brain cells to see what was going on in other diseases. It was difficult, but also really fun, because I came in with a different perspective. We’ve gotten to some new ideas and new ways of thinking, just by coming from a slightly different angle.”
Meanwhile, Saunders had also pursued a consulting career outside of academia, which followed on from his involvement with the Early- and Mid-Career Researcher Forum at the Australian Academy of Science since 2011. “We went out and asked young scientists, ‘What are the most important things to you that we can advocate for?’ The message came back very strongly around the need to advocate on gender equity.”
As Saunders became involved in advocating for equity and diversity in professional bodies, he was asked to work with former Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick at her Sydney-based consultancy firm, Elizabeth Broderick & Co, as a senior research advisor. The role involved running qualitative and quantitative research to learn more about how organisations, such as mining companies, airlines and police forces, dealt with issues related to equity and diversity.
“Liz asked me as an academic, but also as someone who’d been speaking in that space, to come in and do some research with her team,” says Saunders. “The way we presented the data back to the clients was through the voices of the people that work for them. We chose stories that highlighted data points [that might otherwise be passed over]. It was quite an eye-opening thing to see that work in practice. It’s not just numbers, it’s people.”
In his new role as Deputy Chief Scientist & Engineer in the Office of the NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer, Saunders is hoping to use what he’s learned throughout his academic, consulting and communicating career to bridge the gap between science and the public. “I’m always surprised by just how little engagement most people have with what a scientist is and does,” he says. “That’s always a good thing to remind yourself of.”
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Story by Ken Eastwood