Recognising Your Role in the Big Picture: A Conversation with Gretta Pecl

By Leah Shamlian

With a quick Google search, it’s easy to find Gretta Pecl’s accomplishments – and they are impressive. Gretta’s career started in the world of ecology, inspired by an interest in insects when she was young and spurred by a bit of a contrarian streak when higher education wasn’t necessarily encouraged. She credits several mentors for her continuation in academia and now works to pay it forward.

The idea of recognising your own skills and limitations underpins Pecl’s work: on interdisciplinary teams, in science communication, and when interacting with stakeholders. She stresses the importance of people in all disciplines contributing their expertise to both the scientific world as well as the bigger picture: lifting others up, looping all communities in the conversation, and recognising the value of all kinds of knowledge. 

Could you tell me about what your job entails? 

I have two parts to my job. One is as a director of a virtual research centre, called the Centre for Marine Socioecology – an interdisciplinary collaboration between the marine and climate divisions of a research agency here and the University of Tasmania. We do lots of funky stuff and we have a really big emphasis on science communication and engagement; not just performing that, but also researching how we can be more effective in the way that we communicate and connect and engage people. 

I’m also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, which is a research-intensive fellowship all about climate-driven species redistribution in marine systems. Most of my personal work is on how climate change is leading to a redistribution of life on earth, and what that means for society. 

Is there a single action that people in the science and academic world can do to make science more accessible to the general public?

The whole challenge of science communication and engagement is a pretty gnarly, complex thing. Everybody in a team has different strengths, and we should try and play to our strengths. I don't think every scientist needs to be communicating, but we all need to make sure that somebody in our team is doing that, because I don't think our job is done until we communicate what we've done and what that means for society. 

Another bit of advice would be that we need to make sure we're meeting people where they are. For the first part of my career, science communication to me was booking a seminar or rocking up to a meeting and telling people what I thought they needed to know. However, I now think it's very important to put effort into understanding what people know at the moment, and what's meaningful to them. And then we try and respond to that. We still have to have a role in identifying the topics to some degree. But people have lots of questions, and if we don't ask them what they want to know, then we might be missing the mark. 

And the really, really challenging bit is how do we engage the unengaged. That's why I think it's important to try and figure out what is important to that group. A lot of our climate change communication is with fishing industry people; there are things that are huge issues for them, but they don't necessarily connect them in a really direct way to climate. We want and need to be aware of these things so that we are sensitive to their major concerns, rather than just sort of swanning in and going “Climate, climate, climate,” when they might be worried about, “Well, how do I feed my family tomorrow.” 

How have you built and maintained the relationship with relevant communities, especially people that have an automatic tension with academia?

I come from a family and a community that were very un-academic. I feel like I can often put myself in the shoes of people that don't have any framework or scaffolding to start building these scientific concepts onto, because it's just not something that's been part of discussions and lives. One of the key things is having something that maintains a relationship so that the relationship isn’t intermittent. 

I think one of the things that's helped us here in Tasmania is having my citizen science project, Redmap or Range Extension Database and Mapping Project. Here in Tasmania, it's fairly well known and even if people aren't connecting with it directly or individually, they know that this project has been there for the last ten years. In my brain, that's the consistent thread. 

It looks like you originally started with a focus on natural sciences and then later brought in the human dimension. Can you talk about how those have intersected for you? 

I'm not a social scientist; all of that social science-y work that I do is always in collaboration with somebody who has the disciplinary-based skills. I'm an interdisciplinary deejay type person, I'm mixing lots of different bits. My job is the mixer. 

I was always picking up animals and insects and bugs as a kid, but I didn't think of that as a career. We didn't know anybody that had a university education other than the teacher and the doctor. I worked for a couple of years and then I thought, “No, I'll go and do an ecology degree”, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just fell into a Ph.D., and didn't intend on being an academic, I didn't really even understand what that was. 

My PhD was on cephalopods. I had a little 1984 Sigma sedan that I drove from one end of the country to the other, backwards and forwards, sampling squid off jetties, looking at growth and reproduction. And in my post-doc, I was looking at the spawning behaviour of southern calamari. 

After that, I found it really difficult. I think over 19 years I had 12 different contracts. One of my mentors wanted to put this grant in for an interdisciplinary research project looking at climate change impacts and adaptation in the rock lobster fishery. He wanted me to lead it and work with the economists and the managers and the social scientists. And I thought that sounded like the most boring, horrible thing on the face of the planet. But I wanted to stay employed, and I really valued my mentor. I thought, “Oh, it's only two years or something, how bad can it be?” So, I ended up leading this project, and I loved it. All of a sudden, I felt like my world had just exploded. The social scientists kept coming up with all this interesting stuff. I was like, “Oh, never thought about that.” Then the economist would open their mouth and I’d be like “Oh! I never thought about that either!” I discovered that one of my skills is leading interdisciplinary teams, balancing different perspectives, and making people play nicely together. That's how I got into interdisciplinary work. 

I think it's easy to fall into the trap of looking at someone and saying, “Look at their success, look at their trajectory, obviously they're successful” – when it’s not usually that simple. So, I wanted to ask you about a hurdle that you faced and any words of advice. 

It's tricky. You look at someone from afar and you're like, “Oh, my God, look at that person. They've had this long string of success.” 

But what you don't see…. You know, I’ve had at least 55 rejected grants, 20 paper rejections, two unwanted career breaks, two wanted career breaks (that's my children), a couple of years of part time work. I’ve had two tantrums in directors’ offices: “Well, I don’t know what else to do, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, and I still can't get a job.” Frustrations get really hard. The advice that I often say to people is that academics are self-employed. You essentially have to make your own jobs, do your own marketing, build your own network, make all your own collaborations. The networking and mentoring were key things that made the difference for me and I think can make the difference for a lot of people. 

WOS

It seems like you've had a really supportive network of academic mentors. 

Gretta

There are a lot of people working in marine systems here in Tasmania, but we mostly all know each other. Because it's small, you need to play nicely or you get kicked out of the sandpit. And there are a bunch of really excellent academic women that are incredibly supportive of each other here. We find camaraderie in working on things that we believe in really strongly. 

How do you hope your voice and your work will influence others? 

I would hope that I'm able to connect with people that may not necessarily be involved with scientists. I think it's important that the public get to know scientists as people. I would hope that I'm able to communicate to different sectors of the community effectively. 

I finally have the capacity to facilitate the careers of other people. I feel like I'm good at my job, but I'm fairly mediocre in terms of brains. I don't mean that to be too down on myself, but I work with a lot of other people who are incredibly bright, and it's fantastic to be able to do little things to facilitate careers of these people. One of the things that I try to do is to nominate other scientists for awards and things like that. 

But ultimately, climate change, equity, and ecosystem damage and loss are the three core things that I would like to have a positive impact on. And I feel really quite bad about the state of the planet that we're leaving young people. I basically just want to be able to say that I did whatever I could to try and avoid some of that.