By not celebrating and talking about success, it means we don’t have the language or tools to give potential investors the confidence that they are investing with people that know what they are doing. Pitching to investors is as much about pitching yourself, as it is about the idea.

You need to be comfortable in your own skin, talking about your own worth and your own successes. And that takes practice and an environment in which you can practise. In Australia we don’t create that environment, we suppress people by discouraging or ignoring these stories. It’s a part of the research commercialisation challenge we simply must address.

So, why is it so hard to improve funding systems? Surely a scientific approach could be used to create a fair, efficient and sensible system? The answer is simple, but maddeningly ironic: the systems for funding science are human processes and science is ignored.

The decade 2021–2030 has been declared the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. A global stakeholder engagement exercise, overseen by the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, has produced a framework that articulates 10 challenges and seven outcomes for ‘the ocean we want’.

Making space more accessible is great, so long as we don’t lose focus on climate change and ensure that the demographics of our space-farers is not skewed to only include the uber-rich.

To witness the incredible scientific feat of delivering multiple vaccines against a previously unknown coronavirus within a year has been nothing short of amazing. But seeing the delays and missteps in the roll-out of those vaccines in Australia leaves many feeling a very different sense of amazement.

If not addressed, the declining level of investment in research will lock Australia into under-performance for decades to come. Will Australia see the light and set its sights on a knowledge-based economy? Or will it continue its luddite approach to economic investment?

Now is also a critical time for our leaders to hear, understand and embrace the epic narrative that AI is writing for the future of healthcare.

Over the years there has been a call to incorporate the arts into the STEM acronym, turning it into STEAM. The main argument seems to be that we need an explicit acknowledgement that arts-based learning is a critical part of our education. By why frame it around STEM? It’s limiting and distracting.

Universities and research institutions work hard to promote the crucial achievements of…