Today's STEM Spotlight: Dr Catherine Ball
We’re shining spotlights 🙋🏽♀️🔦on STEM Industry superstars ✨🙌🏽 this month as part of our virtual 📲 Workplace Mentoring and Employability Skills Training Program, which runs across the state until June 26 in partnership with the Victorian State Government.
The program connects students with leading STEM industry mentors, and helps them plan and build career pathways and new employability skills for the thriving futures that await them in tomorrow’s post-#COVID-19 world. 😷🌏🤗. You can learn more about the program here.
Today we’re spotlighting Dr Catherine Ball 🔦🙌🏽 - a scientific futurist, speaker, advisor, author, founder, executive producer, executive director, company director and charity patron working across global projects where emerging technologies meet humanitarian, education and environmental needs.
Catherine also likes to create businesses and champion movements, collaborate with peers - and advise game-changers - and you’ll have a chance to learn from her in our upcoming Workplace Mentoring STEM Webinar Series as part of the above program! DETAILS SOON :)
But in short, Dr Catherine Ball is a total gun. 👊🏽
HERE’S DR CATHERINE BALL’S STORY IN HER OWN WORDS.
One of my earliest memories is from the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s.
My mum remembers me asking endless questions about how we could let something like that happen. Mum didn’t have all the answers. I can revisit that memory by watching the news article that was on the BBC over 30 years ago today on YouTube.
“Humans can do terrible things.”
I also remember the Live Aid concerts, and the performances on the telly, chatter on the radio, and endless music sessions delivered by cassette tape. People donating, rock stars getting angry, children asking unending questions about ‘why’ these things happen. Even with events today we still find people fighting against the dark.
“Humans can do extraordinarily good things.”
Looking to the future now, with my two children, I wonder what their ‘Ethopian Famine’ moment will be. Bushfires? Floods? The Bee Crisis? Climate Change? Killer Robots? And I also wonder what can be done right now to stop those terrible moments from happening. Where and how and when can we make the choice to do extraordinarily good things?
Industry 5.0 (the next (5th) industrial revolution) should tip the invisible hands of economics towards a purpose-driven economy, and let it be a natural transition via investors, subsidies, government policy, and media campaigns. But Industry 5.0 won’t be able to reach its full potential unless we all care enough to act accordingly. The future of work is already here, it is just not distributed the same way across different socio-economic, gender, nor geographical locations.
Australia has the capability to become a lighthouse for #techforgood and other purpose-for-profit business models.
I started getting into entrepreneurship because I had identified a number of gaps between technical capability and tangible action. We have technologies that can be applied to do some amazingly good work, but there are management, insurance, business-culture, and other human reasons why these changes are not making it to business as usual in a traditional economic model. The start-up ecosystem is fundamental to creating and curating innovation at low risk to traditional, large business.
A good friend of mine survived a terrible terrorist act. When asked what advice people should be given when watching such horror unfold she said to me “look for the people helping”. And the same can be said for the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) community: There are always people investigating new ways of doing things, trying to help, working on a better way.
From cancer drugs to ethical artificial intelligence, from methods of clean up for ocean plastics to using drones to monitor endangered species. If we can focus on the good that people are doing and share it across our networks then we amplify the voices of the excellent people doing extraordinarily good things.
Interesting opportunities are emerging from the digital technology space that will help people feel like they’re actually making a difference, and this should encourage others to build purpose into their business models, whilst satisfying shareholders.