Australia’s future Leaders flock to PoultryGrad 2013
Postgraduates, Post-doctorates and Interns from Australia’s Poultry CRC gathered recently in Melbourne for the CRC’s annual PoultryGrad workshop.
Held over two and a half days, this year’s event featured classroom sessions from renowned Australian science communicator Julian Cribb and site visits to Ridley Agriproducts Feedmill and the Pfizer Animal Health (now Zoetis) manufacturing facility.
Following a welcome dinner, the first full day commenced with Poultry CRC CEO Professor Mingan Choct speaking about leadership. He showed how a leader should work to achieve effective collaboration and innovation. Drawing from years of experience, he advised the audience that the best way forward in any given field is to seek out the ‘best people’ residing in that field, globally.
He listed key points to remember when forming an effective team, and spoke of the importance of carefully managing multiple personalities. Professor Choct believes that “effective collaboration should lead to an enhancement of both parties’ capabilities and not an ‘averaging out’, which lowers the overall effectiveness and impact of the collaboration”.
Next, Julian Cribb presented on the art of science communication. Special emphasis was placed on communicating research to a broader, non-scientific audience. Julian bought with him two journalists from Coretext, a leading R&D custom publisher and communications agency in Australia, Dr Gio Braidotti (PhD in molecular genetics) and Ms Alexandra Roginski. These two reporters conducted mock interviews with selected students, ranging from professional through to tabloid-style interviews. Feedback received from this session showed that this was one of the highlights of the workshop.
