Until a traumatic event happened in her teens, Professor Julie Bernhardt was still unsure about where her life would take her and was considering a career as a primary school teacher.
Instead, at 16, her uncle Barry – himself just 50 – had a serious stroke, creating a “watershed” for Bernhardt and giving her a clear direction to head.
“It was a very influential thing to happen to me in my life,” she says today, now a world leader in stroke recovery and a senior principal research fellow at the esteemed Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne.
“I’m very close to my family and spent time with my uncle, and my aunt, who was his carer. It made me look at what happens when someone has a brain injury and how do you help them to recover.”
Almost four decades on, Bernhardt acknowledges how this early insight helped give her the clarity and personal drive to succeed as a woman in a field traditionally dominated by men.
But with just 8% of women scientists making it to professor level or to the top tiers of fellowship funding in Australia, she says there is still a long way to go.
To help address this cultural challenge, Bernhardt has driven development of a collaborative initiative aimed at helping the retention and progression of women in science.
The Women in Science Parkville Precinct (WiSPP) is committed to fostering women leaders across five Parkville-based research institutes: the Florey; the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute; the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre; the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research; and the Doherty Institute.
The key objective is to start change locally, through supporting the development of a more gender balanced leadership in the “precinct”, with the hope this may filter to the medical community generally.
Bernhardt says: “The aim is to create change that allows us to do exceptional research and help women achieve the highest levels of academic excellence.
“What we need to change in the system is to have more women come up through the pipeline and into to these senior levels.”
As part of the program, WiSPP has partnered with the National Australia Bank to pilot a cross-cultural mentoring program, teaming 15 senior leaders from NAB with 13 women and two men from across the institutes.
Bernhardt says she “loves mentoring” and is excited to see the outcomes that might be achieved through pairing scientists with NAB bankers which she hopes will bridge the gaps in the skills required for personal and professional growth while encouraging important gender balanced leadership across both sectors.
Bernhardt says structural barriers of insecure fellowships and grants in science make for “a tough system to work with” and is pleased to be working collaboratively with NAB on the WiSSP initiative to help broaden skills beyond research.
“It’s a unique partnership idea and it’s going to be really interesting to see what comes out of it. It shows that there are scientists interested in being mentored on a broader scale – to think about leadership in other areas. I think people are going to get things from participating in this program that they never expected.”
Bernhardt trained in physiotherapy in the early 1980s. She worked in London before returning to Australia and completing her neuroscience PhD in stroke recovery at LaTrobe in 1999 and having her son Aaron, now 16.
After starting at the Florey as a young post-doctoral fellow in 2001, Bernhardt has just finished leading the first multi-country large clinical trial into alternative models of early rehabilitation care.
The project, called “A Very Early Rehabilitation Trial” (AVERT), took 10 years to complete, looking at more than 2000 stroke patients across 56 hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Malaysia and Singapore.
“I get enormous satisfaction thinking that I’m somehow helping to make change and improvements for the better,” Bernhardt says. “That is my definition of success.”
While there are many different types and severity of stroke, her research suggests the current model of a single long rehabilitation session should be replaced with shorter, more frequent treatment early after a brain injury. Her next step is another large international study, to take place over the next five to six years.
With husband Tony – chief architect of the National Broadband Network – also in a big job, Bernhardt makes sure to maintain a work-life balance by sailing and singing in the Coburg Trolls Choir.
In pursuing a research career Bernhardt often advises others to “reflect on what are the things and ideas that give you energy. Reflect on what would motivate you to pursue this in a dogged fashion. Research needs that kind of dedication.
“I’m energised by people: by getting complex groups of people to work together. Give me blue-sky thinking and people and I’m happy. It’s about making change that others can pick up and build on into the future. For me that’s the motivation.”
