Jean Paul (Part 2) on leading virtual transdisciplinary teams and stakeholder engagement

Geri: 00:00:05

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. Have you ever faced the challenges of trying to co-design a project with stakeholders? And have a focus on both doing good science and having an impact on actual practice at the same time. Have you ever wondered what it takes to lead a research project? And more, challengingly a distributed project team undertaking trans disciplinary research. And supporting diverse career paths. And do you wonder if you have the skills and knowledge to practically make a distributed transdisciplinary project team work well? If you said yes to any of these questions or curious about them, I think you'll find lots of value in this ongoing conversation with Jean Paul. Jean is a senior scientist at the medical university of Innsbruck in Austria. In part two of our conversation here, she continues to reflect on their very deliberate design of both stakeholder engagement. And bringing the same values into their organizational structure. Which is reflected in how they built their team, built their relationships, manage meetings and lots more. Also loved in this conversation, how Jean reflected on, how she developed the mindset and skills to bring to this leadership role, even though she's a relatively young researcher. If you recently listened to part one, You might just want to skip ahead now to about seven minutes into the episode. If you need a little bit of a recap, both to who Jean is her background and to the project context. I'll let Jean introduce herself again, just as a recap of where we got to in part one. Jean, do you want to introduce yourself?

Jean: 00:02:26

A fellow Australian, and I moved to Austria in 2018. Up until then, I was working as a researcher at the Children's Hospital in Melbourne at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. And I would describe myself as a social scientist have quite a mixed academic background. I studied arts and science in combination at university. So I've always been interested in science and how things work, but maybe also in combination with how people experience health and illness and medical systems and so my PhD in Australia was looking at communication between doctors who specialize in genetics and their patients. I then did a couple of postdocs in Melbourne as a qualitative researcher, always working in these topics to really understand those complex questions of, you know, social representation or understanding decision making, understanding behavior change understanding relationships between professionals or between families, across professionals, across organizations.

Geri: 00:03:32

Jean then went on to talk about applying for participation in a sandpit that was being held in Vienna, Austria. Um, and organized by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute. And so she describes the process and also talks about the project that ended up being funded And I replay this here because it's important context for what we talk about in part two.

Jean: 00:03:55

there was a kind of core group of us that, had this idea that children whose parents have a mental illness are really missing a social network, in modern times. and you know, the informal support and the low threshold neighbor that comes over to help out, is something that could really make a difference to in these circumstances. And so we had this concept of the village, which ended up getting funded.

Geri: 00:04:23

jean then went on to talk about the way in which the project got set up, uh, based in Innsbrook in Austria and discussing the transdisciplinary team they had, that was distributed and some of the process of how they started recruiting participants. And again, just a quick recap for context.

Jean: 00:04:43

We gave a lot of control to the hospitals to make decisions about how children could be identified and how families might be recruited into the project. And the head of the psychiatry department here wanted it to be the job of the doctors of the psychiatrists to recruit families rather than the social workers or the nurses. Because he felt that it was the job of psychiatrists to ask patients about their family and about their general well being, not just about their symptoms, but understanding their social network, understanding their world, so as a psychiatrist, you can treat the patient better. Psychiatrists have a very short amount of time to work with families. So that didn't always mean that the conversation was very in depth and they may not have really understood what the project was about. And if we had nurses or social workers, they had much more time to reach more families, to have a higher recruitment. But through doing that, we were able to have these questions about parenting and general well being of Children or caring responsibilities introduced into the electronic medical system of the hospital here in Innsbruck. And this is something that our colleagues in Melbourne have been trying to get changed for over 20 years. Being in a small city and really helping the community feel a sense of ownership of our research I think helped make a change that hopefully is going to be very valuable for doctors in thinking about who their patients are. When we started the doctors, some of the psychiatrists told us that the project wouldn't work because their patients didn't have children and we know that's Internationally, that's not true, but so why would it be different in Innsbruck? And then we had some change over time where some of the psychiatrists said, actually, I think this project would be really valuable because if we start understanding about caring responsibilities, maybe we can reduce the length of stay, inpatient stay for these adults and help in their recovery. Can we also include some assessments of recovery in the evaluation.

Geri: 00:06:51

So the whole approach of being driven primarily by impact and it's still, it's research. But not just for the sake of high quality journal publications and the careful thinking about who you involve and how you involve them sounded really key to that. And this is where we pick up for part two. Where Jane continues to talk about how they've worked with their stakeholders. And this leads onto a discussion around leadership and project design, organizational design, and so on. What were some of the challenges in working with stakeholders in this way in a project? Yeah. Because I think you talked before about it's sort of about not having as much control in defining what goes forward.

Jean: 00:07:43

I think we had to start off in a, from a very humble position, which especially for me not speaking German and I was coming in to fix things in Innsbrook that wasn't gonna be accepted, if that's the way I was gonna view, view the job. So we really had to start off by being curious and inquisitive and listening to people and identifying their needs, their concerns, their suggestions for solutions. And so we did that through some network events, but also through qualitative interviews. And then we ran a series of workshops over six months with a group of stakeholders. And I think what was really powerful was in those workshops we used case vignettes from those interviews to present certain situations where children might have been put in the pediatric department of the hospital overnight because the parent was admitted and the child didn't have anywhere else to go. And we then used those vignettes for the participants to identify best practice, worst practice and prioritize as a group. What could we change together within the scope of this project? What's the priority? Where should we target? Who should be doing what? I think some of the challenges were that we were doing a research project that needed to be evaluated and it needed to still be research. So some of the practitioners might have a solution. And then feel that, why do you need a research project, you just need you know, this group to have more money, or we need one more team member here, and then that solves the problem why do you need money to write papers and to do research on this and I think, yeah, some of the challenges were the pace of research compared to Sometimes in Austria, someone has an idea and they can get money from the local government to run some kind of small service very quickly if it's, you know, if they're lucky. But I think that's also part of a bigger challenge that that I've experienced in Austria compared to Australia, that a lot of services are not evidence based. So there's a lack of health services research and our colleague in Vienna, Ingrid Zeckmeister Koss is the Deputy Director of the Austrian Health Technology Assessment Organization. And you know, the decision making behind which treatments are valuable, and especially in mental health and social services is very difficult to follow. And Austria is quite fragmented in its service provision, and it, within Tirol, It's very fragmented because you have the mountains and, you know, from coming from Australia distances are very short, but I've grown to learn that they're actually a lot further away sometimes

Geri: 00:10:34

Because those valleys make a big difference. Yeah.

Jean: 00:10:38

exactly and telehealth isn't something that people really use or accept. So the services are very localized and fragmented and can be quite short term. You know, something was. It was offered for some time, but then it was only for one term and someone else, and it was lost to the system. So I think there were frustrations sometimes from our stakeholders that we know the solution, you just have to fund it, or you just have to do this, and why do we need to take so long in, in doing all this process to have research. At the same time, there were also stakeholders who had experience in research who maybe didn't like how experimental it was and non traditional and the vagueness sometimes in what we were doing. And that was sometimes also a challenge for when we were running the intervention because we designed a new role as someone who we call a village facilitator, who sort of helps the parents create this network or strengthen this network with the child. And these village facilitators had different backgrounds in psychology or pedagogy, social work. And this was a new role. And, you know, Austria isn't particularly known for things happening so quickly and such innovations in systems. And that was very difficult for professionals as well in, what are the expectations of my role? What do I do if this happens? And so they had. supervision, again, with this relationship manager, Boltzmann, who had the psychology training. She would provide monthly supervision with that group of practitioners to understand their role. And we also had monthly supervision or monthly meetings with them for the organizational aspects, the questions that they had that were coming up because we wanted to learn from them as well, how that role worked in reality. And sometimes there were changes to the role as it was going on, which caused challenges for the evaluation of the project, which was led by a health economist in London. In terms of the complexity of the research design it was quite high in designing something together with stakeholders, implementing it and evaluating it within the space of four years. And then having COVID hit in the middle of that time. So we had a six month extension. And just as we started to try and find families to increase their social network, the lockdown started. And in, in Innsbruck, in Tyrol here, this was, you know, the centre of some of the early spreads of the pandemic. So the hospital in Zams was one of our study sites and they basically closed and were only dealing with COVID. And so mental health wasn't something that they could respond to at all. So we had to wait, I think, six months before we could even train the staff there to start recruiting families.

Geri: 00:13:35

So you've mentioned team members in Vienna, in London, in Germany, and I see on the webpage you've got some in Australia as well and all around the place. Can you reflect a little bit on the experiences of being a PI and leading a project? Are you one of the few sitting in Innsbruck and how do you deal with the distributed team? To keep every, especially in this more open project and with the more transdisciplinary approach that you're talking about, where people can't just get sent off into their little silos to throw stuff over the wall.

Jean: 00:14:16

Yeah and we started also with another researcher in Pakistan and another one in Norway who left during the project. So it was very international, very interdisciplinary, and I was the only one then based in Innsbruck. We then employed a group here team here who started six months after the project started. So for the first six months, I was sitting here by myself in the biology building of the university talking in my computer and having meetings online. People were very confused why I'd moved to Austria to sit by myself. But I think, yeah, it's, it was a big challenge leading such a team and my previous work in Melbourne, I had been a postdoc, mostly working by myself, choosing my own things, working for other people. The more I've been here, the more I've realised how much I drew from outside in my private life and things that I've done more generally to support my leadership position here. So I was I've always been involved in a lot of sport and community development. And which the sports don't exist here. So I was heavily involved in netball, which I've had to educate people on a little bit here and haven't had a chance to start up a team yet. Probably exists in Vienna. But I was on the board of our local sports club, the netball and football club as the only woman and the only person under 60 or so. And was writing grants to to the local council in Melbourne to get funding for uniforms or funding for to waive fees for families who are more disadvantaged. I was very and am very passionate about community sports or organized programs like that in, creating places for people to, to have responsibility, to have routine, to learn about themselves, to learn from each other. And yeah, I think that also working in Australia, I did some some work as a youth worker in Central Australia in a remote community where most of the town, the people there weren't speaking English and They were very sceptical of people from outside coming in to help because in Australia we have a very dark history of not being able to support our Indigenous population and not really having the rest of the country, I think, not really having good knowledge on the situation in remote places aboriginal Australia and a very big difference in life expectancy, but when I was working in those towns I took the approach that I was there to spend whatever time I had with them to provide services to support them in their activities that they wanted to do. So having a background in in sport and also I used to work at the local YMCA as a, in holiday programs or after school care. So providing activities for families. So that meant organizing bingo nights or taking families out to go hunting or going to a swimming hole. And fairly quickly, they accepted me and gave me a blood group or a blood name, which is in Australian, Aboriginal Australia, they have Groups of families that are connected not just through blood, but also through social connections which means that you're, as well as having your parents, you have a network of people around you who can take on parenting responsibilities and that sometimes it's a good thing because, you know, your auntie, who's not necessarily your auntie, blood auntie, also needs to look after you if you don't have some food or if you need help with schooling. But it also brings a lot of expectations and sometimes shame for the adults who might not be able to provide that support when people ask, because at least in the communities I was working in, I think it's a bit more universal. It's very shameful not to be able to give someone what they ask for. And that's, I think, very different to Western communities that if kids want an ice cream, you can say no. Yeah. So I think those experiences the more I reflected on them, the more I saw how they provided me with insights into working in a country that I don't speak the language and I don't know much about, so I had to wait and be told.

Geri: 00:18:26

So how would you summarise those in terms of the transferable skills

Jean: 00:18:31

I think the skills were really that could be transferred to here were recognizing the importance of community and of listening and respect and acknowledging that people have their own solutions and you know, coming from outside, not being ignorant to think that, you know, better. because you're from Melbourne or because you went to a university. But everyone has their own their own knowledge and their own perspectives. And you can create something together if you are able to listen. In that way. And I think that's what all of my community work taught me as well that I wasn't there to fix it to fix anything. I was more there to listen and learn and see what would be possible together to do.

Geri: 00:19:22

Yeah, lovely. I mean, you talked about those terms in terms of being humble and listening and being curious when you talked about the stakeholders and so you also played out those same ways with the team.

Jean: 00:19:37

Yeah, and I think the team that became more complicated as we went through. The first phases of the project and had got to know about each other a bit, but the pressure was sort of building as the research was getting underway and people were realizing maybe how much they had to give away of their own expectations or if things were moving off track from what they would predict. And so that's where the Boltzmann was helping again. And I had, some support from the career center there, which I think is also really valuable and in Australia, I think that's more common that you have a department within a university or within a research organization that really focuses on supporting people's career. Something that I think is often the case, though, is that supporting careers in academia usually means supporting them out of academia. And not really thinking what diversity there is inside academia for people to excel. And I think that is something that the Ludwig Boltzmann have been trying to work on, but I think could go a lot further and more generally at other universities in Austria that it's not about being a professor or not. I think there's so many different roles that people can take and people can have in research and value that they can bring. And I think that's one of the challenges in Austria that there really is this ceiling. But if you're not doing a PhD and if you're not then moving on to the next step, it's much better for you to get out and do something else.

Geri: 00:21:11

Yeah. And we need to take much broader views now when we're training so many more PhD students as we often talk about, and the number of permanent positions, if you wanted to continue in that more traditional path, are quite limited. And it is true about the diversity of contributions that can be made. So is there anything else you'd want to reflect on in terms of how you've helped facilitate distributed team working together?

Jean: 00:21:42

Yes, I think also coming from Australia, I've had a bit of a privileged position that our university systems are much more flexible to diverse careers. So you don't have to decide at the age of 13 what type of future you're going to have, what type of profession you're going to have. And even at the age of 18 I think it's changing a little bit in Australia with the more American style university system. But at least when I was training, I could do two degrees at the same time and keep my feet in both camps, I guess. And I've been able to maintain that. And I guess, you know, calling myself a social scientist is a little bit of a vague term anyway, which I like staying in that vague area. And I think that's not as possible for people inside Austria who've been trained in the Austrian system. Especially having a medical university separated from other parts of the university. If you're wanting to do interdisciplinary research in health it's very complicated. And people in humanities can be much more theoretical and not as applied sometimes because they don't have access to the groups that they would be generating theories about, and people inside the medical university don't have the skill set to do that more theoretical or social aspect of research. So in, in my team here, I think I've provided opportunities for team members to have that career path, at least until now, and we see how that works So in this the next project that was funded, we have two PhD students who are enrolled in the psychology department but have very different backgrounds. So one originally did her bachelor's degree in economics and then a master's at the at the more technical university here, more business oriented. But was interested in behavior change and decision making about tourism and then was working in the village project and now is working on a PhD topic around peer support for mothers who have a postnatal depression. And I have another PhD project who's also a PhD student, who's also a project manager, and he studied sociology and then organizational studies. And now he's doing his PhD in psychology but both of them are interested in implementation science as a discipline or using implementation science in health research but that doesn't have a very strong home yet in Austria. It's more in psychology, but in Australia you can come at implementation science from quite a lot of different disciplines.

Geri: 00:24:16

Yeah. Yeah. Again, the parallels, because I grew up here in Austria in the technical university, and it's that similar sort of disciplinary silo as a university. And I think for all of us, The complexity of the problems that we're dealing with, if we want to have real world impact, we necessarily don't have all the answers ourselves within any discipline or even within any person in a discipline because we all bring different perspectives even when we might wear the same label. And I do see that over the time that it has changed, I see that at our university, they're much more open to employing people in positions in the faculty, in the informatics faculty that don't have a strict Computer science background, which, and when I first started here would have been totally unthinkable, well it was unthinkable, it was, you just couldn't do it. We've had many fights because I, our research area is quite similarly bringing together people from different perspectives. We probably should be wrapping up and there's so many more things that I'd love to talk about, you know, cause I know this new project is to do with supporting parents and children during pregnancy and the perinatal period. I know you've just started that project really. Some of the people that I speak to on the podcast talk about the challenges of being an academic or a professional and the challenges of having babies or having family. Are there any insights that are coming out from your research so far that may be relevant to people working in the academic research space and how they might handle that perinatal period.

Jean: 00:26:07

I think at least in Austria, there are quite a lot of services, but not a lot of awareness of services and supports, and I think something that probably is quite helpful is having discussions ahead of the birth on expectations and expectation management. We've just had a medical student who's finished his thesis just now looking at a historical analysis of perinatal mental health services in Austria and the changing role of families and women and expectations about motherhood. And I think something that was discussed a lot in those interviews is the pressure on women which exists even more in smaller areas of Austria to be a good mother, for everything to be perfect. And, you know, as a midwife, you would also know this, the information that Parents are getting around the birth. It's just expanding exponentially in how to do things right. And losing sight sometimes of what the baby's telling you and what you're telling, what you're What your gut is telling you, what feels natural, what feels normal, and I think things can become overly complicated and therefore, you know, overly stressful from social pressures from the outside, and especially if you're an academic, then you're interested in, Picking up all of that knowledge and all that information and I think sometimes it's also helpful to put that to the side and just try and focus on the baby and the family unit and What feels good for you?

Geri: 00:27:40

Yeah. That sounds great advice just to take the pressure off because also we're probably unnaturally oriented to wanting to be perfect and good just being in this career path anyway. And this becomes yet another performance metric in a way. Yeah.

Jean: 00:27:57

say one other thing in Austria then would be the parental leave is for mothers the expectation that mothers are going home and taking the responsibility for the baby in those first years and that your job is protected depending on your profession, but generally, yes. And there are opportunities for fathers to take parental leave as well. But sometimes the fathers don't know. Or the job, even though it might be against the law doesn't ensure that job will be there if the father takes the leave. Or there's social pressures that you're seen as weak if you're a stay at home dad in that time. And so I think, yeah, especially in academia, you're potentially missing out on opportunities if you're away from work for a year or for two years. So there are and there should be opportunities to explain absences for parenting reasons, but also that there are opportunities for fathers to take on those responsibilities as well and share that job with the mother. But they're not as well known and they're more difficult to to get put in practice. Think in Austria, the expectation is still the mothers take the leave. And I don't think,

Geri: 00:29:15

yeah. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you'd like to discuss before we wrap up?

Jean: 00:29:23

yeah maybe just briefly in terms of my leadership position. So the, I had a special intervention support from an expert in virtual leadership. From a woman called Ghislaine Caulat, who's a social action researcher in leadership and in organizations. And the Ludwig Boltzmann put me in touch with her to think about how we could manage online communication, online team management. In addition to in person management, because this is happening in parallel with my team and we ran a series of, she did some interviews first with the team to talk about expectations, and then we had some workshops together and designed new ways of working virtually, which really changed the atmosphere in the team and something that I've carried on Into this next project as well. With the next project at the start, we knew from the first project that you really need to invest in the team set up and expectations and organization early on. So we wanted to do that differently because we didn't really get the chance to think about that in the first project. We sort of had to hit the ground running. So we also had some support from the Ludwig Boltzmann and used a consultant from the UK to do some organizational design work with us. And the result of that was really to change the activities of our work in a completely different way. Rather than having work packages structured around time or discipline, we ended up organizing our work around, more around the objectives that we wanted to have in our work. So we have a unit on stakeholder engagement, a unit on participatory research awareness and social impact and policy, and each of our investigators are responsible for one of those units with me overall with overall responsibility. And this was really to try and reinforce the value that we wanted our work to have. And making sure that those important aspects were front and center and not a tack on element at the side.

Geri: 00:31:37

yeah. And just that in framing it in terms of what the work objectives are does that also increase the need for people to talk together across the different locations, disciplines to come together, to contribute to that objective?

Jean: 00:31:58

I think one of the challenges then in this new organization is that traditional research then is only conducted in one of the units. participatory research and the other units may be seen as non research units. But that's something we reflected on together that you know, the research project is this whole global set of activities and everything is coming together to reach the research questions and the research objectives. Also that the investigators have different expertise. So in this new project, we have one health economist one psychologist, two psychiatrists, and myself. So none of them are you know, public health communication experts or working in policy every day. So we didn't leading those units didn't mean that they have to be the expert in that topic. You know, we're still working collaboratively to really think about what the, how to bring those units to their objectives.

Geri: 00:32:59

love that, that you've used this participatory stakeholder engagement to design your organizational structure and ways, how you work together. Did you also do any work in terms of defining shared values and things like that as part of that initial team building work with the new project?

Jean: 00:33:17

Yes. Yeah, so the project itself was funded over two stages through the FWF and it was using this Connecting Minds program of funding where you had to firstly obtain funding for a workshop with stakeholders and then demonstrate how the workshop results fed into the final proposal. So already from there we started to define research priorities with our stakeholders. But once we had the funding and the project was starting with the team. We also thought about values that would underpin the working model of the organizational design. And we did interviews with stakeholders again in terms of the organizational design and their experiences on working in research or Different organizations and what their expectations and values might be. And then we brought those into our workshops where we clarified what our vision was and what our principles to design that organizational structure could be.

Geri: 00:34:19

Nice. Can you share those values that came out or the principles?

Jean: 00:34:25

Yeah. Oh

Geri: 00:34:28

and I can, oh, I, I can just, I can put a link to it on the webpage there. And you also talked about the virtual leadership and virtual team and the process that you went through with that and how it improved in the previous project. So what were the key things that made the virtual collaboration work that came out of that?

Jean: 00:34:50

So we, we came up with a set of rules that we use for our virtual meetings. So that would be the most kind of practical outcome. And the first is no cameras and no muting. And so cameras. The thinking behind this and the research behind this is that you can only process so much information at a time and visual information can mask someone's emotion much more easily than verbal information. And, therefore a meeting with cameras is more likely to lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication because someone might be agreeing with a verbal gesture but in their tone of voice might show some hesitancy, which you could miss if you're just trying to process all that information at once. Another The reason is that the cameras sometimes fail, like you said, if it's a bad internet connection and that's detracting from the meeting itself. So no cameras and no muting means that even if you're sitting there nodding, if you're on mute, you can be doing something else at the same time. So we don't mute, and it brings a sense of closeness in the meeting because you use minimal responses like you are to have that sense of conversation rather than a monologue from one speaker. And we also share roles within the meeting. So everyone has a chance to write minutes. We also have a role of a facilitator, which is different to the leader of the meeting. So the leader of the meeting is responsible for clarifying the purpose and the agenda and organizing the date. The facilitator, in contrast, is responsible for the group dynamics, so they should be, as well as participating having an eye on the time practically, but also thinking there seems to be a lot of tension on this topic. Is something going on here? Checking with the leader. Okay, we've spent a lot of time on this, but I don't think it's been resolved. It sounds like so and so is still not sure of the outcome. Should we just check that again? So they're trying to help the leader reach the goals of the meeting through understanding the group dynamics and keeping an eye on that. And then the minute taker at the end of each agenda item shares the minutes. For everyone to see and has to write if there's been any conclusions, decisions or actions taken and if there's actions, who's responsible and by what date. And that is agreed upon before the next agenda item comes up. So it's a simultaneous minutes and at the end of the meeting, there's less chance that people have gone away with different interpretation and they're shared straight away. And because those roles are shared then, you don't have the as much power hierarchy in that it's not just the junior person in the team who's stuck taking the minutes and can't participate fully.

Geri: 00:37:51

Right. They're all great tips and tricks. Anything else?

Jean: 00:37:59

I think for the leading an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary team that I've taken away is that you can't how much. How much value there is in having short conversations with all your team members regularly. So I have one to one meetings with everyone every fortnight and even if it's not, it doesn't feel so necessary because you're working across disciplines, it's just a chance to debrief and to maybe clarify some kind of assumptions or feel closer to each other, especially if you're working at distance. Bring people, in on the same page you know, check how their work is going and how that might relate to something else that someone else is doing. So maybe that is a bit of a full circle back to my work in Melbourne, where I was working by myself, but still trying to keep these connections across

Geri: 00:38:55

I was just thinking exactly that you're a community builder and a connector.

Jean: 00:39:02

Yeah, so it's a valuable skill to have in this role, I think.

Geri: 00:39:06

Yeah. That's been honed over time. What next for you then, do you think after this project, because this is still short term funding.

Jean: 00:39:14

Well, in the course of this project, I now have a permanent position at the university.

Geri: 00:39:19

Congratulations.

Jean: 00:39:21

Thank you. That also gives me a lot of Yeah, positivity that the university values qualitative research and a medical university in Austria, in Innsbruck. That in the course of this project not having had done any qualitative research in, in, I don't think in their part of the university much at all, to employing someone in a permanent position is a big change. And I, I get so much support from the university here from my boss and from the rectors in valuing what I'm doing. I've also applied for another proposal. We have to wait and see on intercultural comparisons of peer support work in mental health in here and Japan. So at the moment the plan is here. Having a permanent position in research. But we'll see what the future holds. I've yeah, always got an option of going back to Australia if things become complicated, which they sometimes can.

Geri: 00:40:16

Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for the time today to share all this. A lot of the people who might listen to this podcast, would come more from the human computer interaction technology area. I mean, there's a whole range of people and it's both encouraging and also points to the work still to be done that we're seeing sharing many of the same challenges and approaches. And also that there are so many people across so many different disciplinary areas driven by the same cares and concerns and bringing, you know, different contributions in trying to make a difference in research and have impact while still care for doing good science. So thank you. Great to meet you. Thank you, Jean.

Jean: 00:41:03

Yeah. Thank you so much for the conversation.

Geri: 00:41:08

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