01/06/2026
🎓 Last month I walked back into the Great Hall of the University of Sydney wearing academic robes for the first time in years. As an alumna of this university, it meant more than I expected.
🌿 I was there to deliver the Occasional Address to the Faculty of Science graduating class. A Commencement Address, as our friends in the US would know it.
And standing at that lectern, looking out at a room full of people who had spent years learning to understand human beings, their development, their change, their potential, I kept coming back to the same question.
🌍 What are the conditions that allow scientific knowledge to reach the decisions that shape our world?
Because the gap between what scientists know and what gets acted on is rarely about the quality of the evidence. It is about the conditions surrounding the people who carry it.
Psychological safety. Relational trust. The inner capacity to hold your ground when the pressure to go quiet is enormous.
When those conditions exist, knowledge moves.
When they are absent, it disappears into organisations, into meetings, into silence. And the planet pays the cost.
🌱 I have spent more than thirty years watching that gap operate from the inside. Understanding what it would take to close it became the question that changed my life.
My latest essay for Those Who Decide on Substack is the fullest account I have written of why this matters, where it comes from, and what the STEMM Influence Lab is building in response. 🌌
Link in comments. 🔗
