Dr Becky Sage, CEO of Interactive Scientific talks to us abut the company she runs, her journey from Chemistry PhD to CEO and the challenges that still exist for women in science.
Interactive Scientific have won a number of awards for innovation and Becky has generated over £1.3 million to seed the developments. Becky is a winner of the Women in Innovation InFocus awards 2016, WISE 2016 finalist, 42 Under 42 in the South West and Sunday Times Maserati 100 innovator 2019.
Has it been a pretty straight road from science PhD to CEO of a science-based company?
No! Not at all. Before becoming CEO at Interactive Scientific I did a heap of different jobs. The first half of my career was really about finding out where I wanted to be. During my PhD I felt rejected. My overwhelming sense was ‘I do not fit here’. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after my PhD I just knew I didn’t want to carry on working in the environment I had been.
I got a temp job in the Innovation team at the Regional Development Agency (RDA) which was life changing. My exposure to science and technology in a business context at that time was limited. I was able to work with the team that engaged with R&D business which opened my eyes to the commercial application of R&D.
After that I worked at the Royal Society of Cambridge as a Programme manager for Physical Sciences in Cambridge. I worked in membership and events including working on the RSC Roadmap for Chemical Sciences addressing the question ‘How can we make an important impact with science and technology?’
It was a fascinating project but it was also a pretty intense role and one that didn’t really provide me with opportunity to be creative or drive my own activity. I was at a point of burn out and found myself wondering how I could be more in control of my progress.
I was given a book ‘How to get a job you love or love the job you have’ by John Lees. It is a very practical book and one of the exercises that really sticks with me was about building your ‘house’. This includes your hobbies, the things you were exposed to as a child, your work experience, your qualifications, the jobs and interests of the people around you.
It makes so much sense to me as a multi-passionate person, that you are so much more than just your qualification, a job title or salary and that all of those things mean I can bring value to the world in new ways. For this reason a portfolio career was enticing to me, as it gave me scope to work on a number of complimentary projects and build my experience very quickly whilst fulfilling me.
So your career in science started with your Chemistry PhD - tell us about that?
I started working on a particular project as an undergraduate, I had no idea where I wanted to go at the end of university, so I did a summer studentship and carried straight onto a PhD.
It quickly became clear that I wasn’t happy in the lab and when you feel like you don’t fit somewhere you end up doing a lot of soul searching, trying to work out what you’re doing wrong, what’s not quite right, what you need to change to make it better. it took me many years to work out that it was the culture that didn’t work for me.
Were you aware that you were a ‘woman doing science’ during your PhD? Did gender come into it for you?
The focus on ‘Women in Science’ was there when I was studying but it didn’t feel relevant or like it was something I wanted to be. At the time all I knew was that I felt uncomfortable within academia. I wanted to know if there was a working environment out there that was comfortable for all people.
I was young, I didn’t know what bad behaviour and good behaviour in the workplace looked like, you just don’t have those kind of concepts in your mind in your first working environment - you normalise what’s going on around you.
Looking back now I can see there was an enormous amount of inappropriate behaviour - from sexual harassment by people in the peer group through to bullying behaviour.
What’s interesting though is the way that the environment you find yourself in shapes you. I think I was a misogynist in some ways - I certainly didn’t want to be associated with that ‘woman’ group.
There were no women around showing us how to do things differently either - I didn’t once get taught by a woman during either my undergrad or my postgrad. In many senses I was effectively socialised to think and act like a man! These are all realisations that I came to so much later though, at the time all I felt I knew was that certainly academia and probably science wasn’t for me.
When did your understanding of your experience change?
I think the turning point for me was winning the Women in Innovation Award from Innovate UK. It was the first time I’d been around a predominantly female peer group.
As we were talking, I discovered similarities in our experiences. the story that came out the most was one where the women I was with felt like they had to change who they were in order to fit. That was exactly my experience during my PhD.
I felt like I had to switch off my personality. It didn’t feel safe to be me. I couldn’t talk about the type of music I liked, for example. I couldn’t talk in my own voice without being mocked. Don’t get me wrong - I also worked with some really, really great people, especially very senior academics and that experience sent me off on a journey that resulted in me being where I am today.
Do you think that the sciences are becoming more open and supportive towards women? What change do you think could make all the difference?
There is a significant change in narrative and much more visibility of what constitutes good and bad culture and behaviour. more research has been done and there is more understanding - this needs to translate o the “chalk face” of schools and universities though.
Unfortunately, I still hear stories on a weekly basis of senior male academics being supported when women (and men) who are junior to them experience and report bad behaviour. The women need to be respected and their experiences need to be believed, bad behaviour has to be called out. Until this changes we will not feel safe in science labs.
There are many more positive case studies of women who are thriving and hearing these stories is so valuable, so that people, young and old, male and female, can see that science is the domain of everyone.
Tell us more about the Interactive Scientific, the company you run.
Interactive Scientific was originally set up with an Arts Council grant to develop the initial inception ‘dance room spectroscopy (dS)’ and associated performance, Hidden Fields, which brought together dancers, digital technology and science algorithms. The dancers and participants were projected into interactive space and were able to interact with virtual particles.
My first involvement with the company was in 2014, about a year into the project. I met with Phill Tew, the technical lead and co-founder dS (our current CTO) and other early contributors. As we looked at the commercial viability we knew that dS wasn’t sustainable or scalable as it was but that the ideas behind it had potential.
I was inspired by their vision and mission to ignite curiosity using a combination of science, art and digital technology. It united passions of mine around science, communication and business but at that time we needed significant funding to bring those things together and that was very much my bag.
Because of my time working for the Regional Development agency I had a good understanding of the various mechanisms for public sector funding of R&D. The timing was good and Innovate UK had a fund that was focusing on digital tools for education. We got input from the original dS team and stakeholders at the Pervasive Media Studio including Dick Penny and I pulled the application together. We got funded in round one and then we got follow on funding!
So how has Interactive Scientific changed since you first got involved in 2014?
We transformed the original concept into demonstrable technology that has real value in a number of different applications. Our most available and basic is iSci Learn – this is an educational use case of web-based immersive technology which enables students to visualise atoms and molecules. Using scientific data to drive the visuals this interaction has been proven to increase understanding.
We’re passionate about education and connected into the school system. One of the key challenges facing schools when it comes to implementing this kind of technology is that they don’t have the right infrastructure, including kit and bandwidth.
Looking at what we could do in schools in particular to really bring science to life by helping students see atoms and molecules, helping them figure out the answers to the questions ‘how do they know’ is pretty inspiring for me.
At the university level, we’re working with researchers who are understandably excited about the possibilities this use of digital technology, including VR can unleash for them. We’ve collaborated with the University of Bristol and University of Edinburgh on different research projects both of which have yielded publishable data. In 2018 we published a paper based on research derived from using our product and we have just submitted a new one from our most recent collaboration. It’s a good platform to show what can be done though we don’t want to get sucked into working with just a few researchers and labs. We have proven that this technology, as a platform can scale very easily worldwide.
My vision for Interactive Scientific has always been to roll out a profit making business model, though my intention, equally, is that we’ll be putting money back into educational work to create impact across the ecosystem.
What’s next for Interactive Scientific?
I’m looking into the pharmaceutical industry and at enterprise models. For example, our most recent publication has shown the impact that we can have in drug design, which is a 3D problem (so VR can really help). There’s a cross section of stakeholders within industry who want to increase the effectiveness of collaborations by giving them a place of shared information, which really helps build trust and improve communication in teams.
Our intention is to for our technology to evolve into a platform that is available to stakeholders across the spectrum of people within an organisation – from executives, experts, non-experts, sales team and customers. Everybody needs to understand the science behind the products.
Using visuals and technology in this way means you can show lots of information without it being hyper intellectualised. Obviously, the system needs lots of data and cloud infrastructure to support it and the support of Oracle has allowed us to demonstrate that we can do this. If customers can run our product with their own cloud infrastructure their data will be more secure.
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