Johanna Laybourn-Parry

Polar Scientist to department head to University Pro Vice-Chancellor

Johanna has always been fascinated by the natural environment.

Having completed her PhD at Stirling University, where her main interest was in lakes, she left research science to become a school teacher. Although she had little enthusiasm for teaching, she saw this route as most compatible with her marriage and her husband’s career.

A year later Johanna found a route back to research science by securing a Natural Environment Research Council Fellowship. She described this as the start of her academic career.

At the completion of her fellowship, in 1976, Johanna got a permanent lectureship in a university in the north of England where she could commute back home to Scotland at the weekends.

As an ambitious woman with a passion for her science, Johanna didn’t think that she fit into the department very well, a department in which there were few ambitious women and where, in her words, she was expected to ‘just do my job, be a nice little girl and not make a fuss’. In 1989 she got a long overdue promotion to Senior Lecturer. Johanna found that in that role she was in a much better position to pursue her research, acquire funding and access important social networks.

It was during this time that Johanna became interested in Antarctica.  She had met scientists from the Australian Antarctic Survey at a NATO research conference who encouraged her to join them.  Johanna was excited by the prospect of working in Antarctica and saw real opportunities for developing her research on lakes in that unique setting. Although at that time the British Antarctic Survey still employed very few women scientists, the Australian programme was much more progressive. Johanna got the grant, and went South with the Australian team. With very little research having been done on Antarctic lakes, she quickly developed a niche and began to establish herself as a prominent scientist on the international scene.

Over the next few years Johanna won a sequence of prestigious grants, fellowships and studentships which allowed her to continue with her Antarctic work and further enhance her reputation. In 1993 she was awarded a professorship at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. There, in addition to her participation with the Australian Antarctic programme, she became involved with American polar science and became an official collaborator on their Dry Valleys programme. So then, in her words, ‘it all decided to happen’.
Johanna found the academic environment in Australia much more exciting than what she had experienced in the UK, with strict equal opportunities laws and far more enlightened attitudes towards women. For the first time she felt really encouraged....

"They used to throw me the ball and see if I could run with it and of course I could, so they gave me more responsibility. So I very quickly ended up on the most important committees of the university. I was on a really fast learning curve, but it was really exciting and it was challenging, and I really crashed through the glass ceiling in a way I would never have done here".

In 1996 Johanna returned to the UK for personal reasons, and joined Nottingham University as the first woman professor in her department. Faced with greater organizational constraints and entrenched ways of thinking than in Australia, it took Johanna some time to establish her credentials. However, after a few years she was made Head of the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, with positions on many of the university’s important and powerful groups and committees.

Not having had a role model herself, Johanna now recognizes that she is an inspiration to many young women scientists. Although in the UK, she sees it as still extremely difficult for women to combine successful scientific careers with family life, through her involvement in women in science programmes like Athena, Johanna is working to remove some of these obstacles. In spite of what others can give you, though, she still sees opportunism as the ‘real key to a successful scientific career because opportunities come your way and if you don’t grab them they won’t come again’.

In 2005 Johanna moved from Nottingham to the University of Keele, where she is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences. She has just been appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Tasmania in Australia and will take up her appointment in October 2007.