Have you heard that female scientists exist but can’t actually name one? Ever wonder what they might be up to? You’ve come to the right place! ScienceGrrl Glasgow is serving up interviews with real-life female scientists – and they’re really interesting.
Associate Professor Rochelle Constantine
School of Biological Sciences & Institute of Marine Science
Research Group Leader – Marine Mammal Ecology Group
University of Auckland
I work on marine megafauna, so mostly whales and dolphins, but increasingly seabirds, sharks and their prey. I’m interested in what drives their distribution, movement, abundance, behaviour and interactions. I’m more and more interested in oceanic processes – there are often similar things affecting large scale dynamics and the individual species/populations. I also have a sideline in attacking immediate conservation issues. The megafauna often are overrepresented in species of conservation concern; due to issues like ship strike, tourism, isolation, by-catch. One example would be the Māui dolphins – they’re critically endangered.
What made you get into science – and more specifically your area of science?
I was always a kid who was curious about the natural world. I was outside all the time, I basically grew up at the beach. I like animals – I’m really lousy at remembering plant names but I can remember the animals. I guess I did well in biology at school, I had a really amazing high school biology teacher! Science just made sense to me so that’s what I ended up studying at university, but I never really knew exactly what I wanted to be. I live a serendipitous life, I’m quite comfortable with uncertainty. All through my life I’ve just tried different things that were interesting! It’s surprising when you stop and reflect back: you realise all the little things you did to get to where you are today. You often stand and can go in any one of five directions – I just happened to choose this one. I’m an accidental academic!
I was the first in my extended family to go to university. My parents knew the value of education and they always supported my brother and me to do what we wanted to do. My undergraduate degree was in Zoology and Psychology – I was interested in animal behaviour and I was really turned onto the notion of conservation and animal behaviour by this amazing lecturer in my first year. For me they were that one dynamic person that can change the path of so many people.
When I came out of my degree I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, I was interested in all kinds of things. I went overseas to travel and work on various ship-based projects and then I got asked to do my Masters degree. Scott Baker was working here at the University of Auckland and he needed someone who knew how to drive a boat and had done some work on dolphins before – and I was that person! I did it because it was interesting, applied and it was going to be useful. The project investigated the impacts of boats and swimmers on dolphin behaviour and it was quite significant actually.
When I finished my MSc I’d had enough. I ran another couple of research projects, travelled again and then got asked to come back and do my PhD, extending the work I’d previously done on the impact of tourism on the Bay of Islands dolphins. That was a really interesting project and I wasn’t really doing anything else at the time so I decided to go back. I just have a curious mind!
I finished in 2001 and still didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I headed off into the world again. In 2004 I was back here, visiting the University of Auckland Biosciences department and someone said: “You were a really good tutor and teaching assistant! Someone is going on sabbatical, would you like to fill in?” I did, and then someone else went on leave and I filled in for them and before I knew it I had a job! I often tell students this – I didn’t have straight A’s, I just found my thing. I like teaching!
My initial senior tutor role, made up of mainly teaching and a small amount of research, then evolved when Scott Baker (my old supervisor) went back to the U.S. He slowly downscaled his research here, which was different to mine (he is a geneticist), and there was a gap and I started filling it. There was a time when I was doing two jobs essentially and the dean of science here at the time called me into his office and basically said: “This is ridiculous, you need to be appointed as a senior lecturer”.
I resisted it for a while because I find research more challenging. It can be brutal, mean and hard – and I don’t like mean and I’m not good at dealing with those challenges. I love collaborating, so almost all of my projects are interdisciplinary with multiple collaborators. When you’re studying a big thing like the ocean – big animals that move great distances and an ocean that is almost impossible to measure… With more people around the table it’s so much more fun! Exciting conversations happen when you sit an engineer with a psychologist with a bioinformatician with a marine oceanographer – that’s where the fun projects come from and that’s what drives me: lots of cool, nice and talented people working together.
The consequence of this is that the glory is shared. I don’t mind that but the cost is that people who are more… draconian about it and more prepared to take the lead – they get more of the grants and recognition. For me it’s not a competition, I just like finding solutions to problems. So you have to take a big breath sometimes and go “It’s OK, it’s not about me”.
It was a big decision, I liked teaching, but I eventually accepted the senior lecturer role. This was at age 37 so I was quite late coming into working as a professional scientist. I didn’t follow the usual path of school, undergraduate, MSc, PhD, post-doc, job. My path has all these gaps, a path more like a winding river, but I think that helps me as a conservation biologist. I’m maybe more empathetic, open to other ideas, pragmatic. Some of it comes with age but some of it comes with life experience.
What is the best part of being a scientist?
I can let my imagination run wild and I get to think really big, exciting ideas! One of our current projects is called the Pulse of the Gulf, trying to figure out why the megafauna are where they are and how we can work out what the Hauraki Gulf looks and sounds like. We’ve got acoustic arrays, drones, aerial surveys of this large marine National Park and AI tools for detection of megafauna and their prey. Lots of cool new technology being brought in so that we can hear and see via remote sensing at the same time - I’m really excited about this project and grateful for funding from G.I.F.T Foundation North to get it going. We’ve got engineers and NASA space systems people onboard with the acousticians, modellers, geneticists and behavioural scientists and we’re going to collectively find answers to these questions, I’m just loving it. It’s a big idea, I have an overactive imagination as this project shows.
Learn more about the Pulse of the Gulf project here
On a bad day what inspires you to keep going?
My graduate students. They are amazing – so smart and bright and they work SO HARD. Keeping them going as the future of science is really important to me.
I also work with really nice people in general. There are a lot of people I maybe should work with that I don’t, but I like finding all kinds of cool, unlikely people from all over the world – in fact I work more with people internationally than in New Zealand – it’s great fun. All my students have this eclectic mixture of supervisors and advisors on their projects and we pick up the different bits and pieces of their projects that our expertise allow us to.
Finally, I know if you do the right thing that science can be a really powerful reason for change, especially in conservation. I do a lot of science communication and science communicated well CAN affect change.
Those things and a deep breath, that’s what keeps me going.
Do you have a science hero/ine?
Good question – I have a few. A person who influenced me hugely was Nick Gales, who just retired as the Head of the Australian Antarctic Division. Nick was involved with my MSc and PhD as he worked in New Zealand at the time. He is a scientist able to stand with one foot speaking to managers, the public and politicians, and the other foot very firmly placed in science. He’s able to duck and weave between the two and make a lot of difference. I’m nowhere near as eloquent or savvy as he is, but watching him navigate those two quite different worlds has been inspiring. He’s been a great mentor and friend throughout the years and he has given me many opportunities. He just sees really good, fun people – he doesn’t see men and women, he just pulls together the best team. It might be the best team because they’re a really good laugh, but you need a good laugh, that’s the trick!
Learn more about the Australian Antarctic Division here
The other one, keeping it local again, is my PhD supervisor Dianne Brunton. She had a really tough challenge as a female academic. She was taken for granted and never promoted. She had children and her husband is a really successful academic, but he supported her wholeheartedly. This was in the mid-90s, and she had to fight and battle but she maintained at all times her integrity. For me she has been a really powerful person to watch, to learn how to maintain your integrity and dignity despite the challenges of the system. She’s still in science and is a successful Professor.
In New Zealand we like to celebrate that we were the first country in the world to give women the vote, but still within the faculty of science at the University of Auckland the percentage of women in Professor/Associate Professor roles is really low. It’s increasing, we have a really great dean who is mindful of this issue now, but as one of my colleagues said: “You women do really well in science until you have to get a job”. The statistics are not great. I sit here now as a woman, with a child and full time working partner, and I’m an Associate Professor and I realise how that’s still a rare thing in science in New Zealand. It’s not OK, but we’ll get there.
Academic institutions as a whole are slow to change but there is a shift coming. Men are increasingly encouraged and empowered to be more engaged in their children’s lives for example – which benefits everyone. The allowance for both parents to lean in or out as they want/need to concerning childcare is important. A lot of people think women are best placed to look after their children and that this isn’t compatible with having a career, which is absolute nonsense. I’m lucky, my partner has a huge job but he always has time for our daughter – we have negotiations sometimes around conference trips, but we always work it out! We need to compliment and support men making these changes, it’s about empowering them to take on new challenges as much as women. It will be a generational shift in the end I think, I’m really noticing important changes already: more demand for events not being scheduled in the evenings for example – you can have a lunchtime gathering which is more inclusive for everyone.
I’m now quite enjoying organising conferences and shifting things around a bit; getting young women to chair sessions and the guys to organise the catering. If you don’t know how to do that, you will soon learn and students are thankful for all new opportunities! You can write it on your CV, that’s a skill – “I know how to organise food and logistics for all these people”. It’s not trivial. It’s about advancing ALL our young students because they need lots of tools and transferrable skills in their toolbox when they get out into the world. It’s important to allow people to be the best they can be!
Do you have a favourite science fact?
At least every second breath you take is because of our ocean and phytoplankton. We talk a lot about the trees and the forests but at least every second breath is because of the phytoplankton in our oceans. They are small but mighty and under-appreciated! My favourite organism is a coccolithophore – it’s a gorgeous biological form, a beautiful phytoplankton.
What would you like people to know about working in science?
There are many ways you can be a scientist. Often people think you’re always in a lab and coat and you can only do science at a university. You can be a scientist in so many places – in industry, government, communications, business… Scientists are everywhere. At any time scientific thinking can be brought to almost any place, it’s just the ability to ask a question and thinking of strategic ways to answer it efficiently and effectively. Bringing that thinking to problems can really help us distil down what’s most important to the world.
What would you like people to know about your research?
I guess the main things driving my research are these questions:
- Why are things where they are?
- When they’re not there what’s going on?
- How do they recover from population decline?
For the marine mammals, the whales and dolphins, that research happens anywhere between the tropics and Antarctica (which is a bit of a wingspan!) and the science we do is really applied.
I never meant to work on whales and dolphins, I sort of found myself accidentally working on them. I am however a shameless user of them to get people to think about more important questions about our marine environment. They are really important for getting people to think about the big picture. If the ecosystem isn’t working, if the ocean temperature changes say, this means the distribution of prey and productivity of the ocean changes. The seabirds, sharks, whales and dolphins will then move or adapt – for example switching prey or migration patterns, because they have such huge energy needs.
We’re so terrestrial, it’s so hard to get people to think about the ocean. It’s such a big and complicated space. I like using the megafauna to get people thinking about the ocean and having a conversation about my research. People have to realise that we have to do something because the oceans are in a lot of trouble, we treat them really badly.
Learn more about Rochelle and her research here:
What does a scientist do in their spare time?
More science? I like being outside, just walking on beaches or through the bush, observing the world around me. I read mostly non-fiction and I really love architecture, art and design. I find that level of creativity helps me think about my science in a different way, so my mind is never far from science really. I think being a scientist is a way of being, it’s not a job. You’re always observing, thinking: “Why is that bird or leaf there? What is that bug doing? Look at that pollen!” It’s just the way we see the world.
Last question – are there any moments in your career that stand out to you as extra special?
Recently I was awarded the inaugural Sir Peter Blake Trust Environment Leadership Award. I’m so proud of that – it was truly an award, I didn’t know I was going to get it (I’m lousy at applying for things, I don’t like it). To have the work I’ve been involved in recognised was immensely humbling. I always think of my work in terms of “we”, but this award made me realise how pivotal I can be in influencing where projects go and how people lean in because of my enthusiasm. I don’t think of myself as a leader, but maybe I am! That was a really amazing moment.
Then you of course have regular small moments when you’re out and about. People come up and say that I taught them at university and that I was their favourite lecturer. That makes you realise how many people you have taught and in turn how many people have started thinking differently about the world because of you. That’s really lovely – affecting change in a small way like that. I think of the research we do as merely putting down your piece of the puzzle, standing on a piece in a giant knowledge jigsaw. Some pieces are big and some small, but without each of them the puzzle can’t continue. Just put down your piece and keep going, knowing you’re part of some large, collective endeavour.