Dr Michelle Dickinson has had several job titles – retail staffer, bar worker, nanotechnologist, educator – and now, mother. Penny Lewis learns how science and engineering have been part of it all.
With their big, hazel eyes and chubby cheeks, 7-month-old twins Marlow and Kaia are at a deliciously squishy stage. They’re loving solids, cutting teeth, and smiling at the builders renovating their home in Auckland’s inner west. And they’re here because of their parents’ last-ditch attempt to have a family.
Dr Michelle Dickinson, also known as Nanogirl, and her husband Joe Davis had seven unsuccessful rounds of IVF before their twins were born in what turned out to be a lucky eighth cycle. Marlow, the little-boy twin, is two minutes older than his sister.
It’s not lost on Dickinson that the couple’s unexplained infertility couldn’t be quickly remedied by science.
“My poor IVF doctor,” Dickinson laughs. “I’d come to him with all the latest research articles. I would research the sh*t out of it because that’s all you can do while you’re waiting for the next cycle and figuring out why things didn’t work.”
Unexplained infertility is a term used where there is no obvious medical reason why conception hasn’t occurred. “It showed me the complexity of fertility as a field. We just know so little about it. It really is, ‘let’s just try this’. There really is no, ‘well, if you got these results, this is the exact protocol we should follow’.”
“It was hard for my scientific brain. I spent a lot of [time] just researching ‘what do we know and how is it so variable’? Why is it not better written for people to understand what’s going on? And why are we not having conversations about it? The second we started opening up about it, so many of our friends said, ‘oh, ours is an IVF baby’, or ‘we did this, or we did that’. Or ‘actually, we don’t have children because we’ve done eight rounds, and they all failed’. In New Zealand, it’s one in four couples [affected by infertility], we have one of the highest infertility rates in the Western world.”
Dickinson, 44, says she and her husband started trying to have a baby in her early-to-mid 30s. “We were like, ‘oh yeah, it’s great’. And then you try for two years and then you have your first appointment. They’re like, ‘oh, just try for another couple of years. That’ll be fine’. We just thought it would happen because we were in our 30s. Then as time goes on you go, ‘oh, maybe we should do something a bit more serious’, because by the end of it, you realise you’re in your 40s and you’ve been trying this thing for eight years.”
“We did seven rounds and thought, ‘right, that’s it, we’re done’, and then Covid happened, and we had a lot of time to reflect on what’s actually important, so we did another round, our last.”
Like all new parents, Dickinson, and Davis, who also works for Nanogirl Labs, are finding their rhythm with the juggle of raising children and work. “I’m much more efficient than I’ve ever been in my life,” Dickinson says with a laugh.
When Reset asks Dickinson if her view of the world has changed since she’s become a mother, she says she’s always looked at life through the lens of kids and STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – but parenthood has added another layer.
“Why are people not caring more about climate change? What sort of world are my children growing up in? You definitely see your life through [your children] and I want them to grow up in a world that isn’t falling apart.”
“STEM is everywhere and it’s for everybody. Understanding STEM means you can be a creator of the future. I want all our young people to be able to look at the problems that we have, and go, ‘I could help fix that’. And to do that, we build their confidence by giving them the skills they need to fix those problems. What I want for my own kids is what I want for all kids, which is how do we empower them to be able to make positive change and have the skills to do that?
“The world is moving so fast, the digital age is here, we’re now talking about artificial intelligence and technologies of the future. And the [same] jobs are not going to exist like they did for our generation. So how do we make kids resilient? How do we help them to learn quickly? How do we help them to understand what is real and what is fake and where that stuff comes from?”
Dickinson is a judge for this year’s James Dyson Award, for which entries are open until July 19, with winners announced in September. It’s her second stint judging for the annual international design competition, which has a sustainability focus to encourage young inventors to come up with ideas to improve the planet.
“The award is about what I’m passionate about, which is allowing young people to think about how they might solve a global problem and really empower them to realise they can be the changemakers of the future. It’s a massive, global competition, where Kiwis are on the stage with young people like them who care about making positive change. You can show the world what you’ve been doing in your lab at university.”
Dickinson’s own path to university was not an inevitability. She was born in the UK, and moved to Hong Kong, where her mother Wendy is from, as a young child. The family moved back to the UK when she was 11.
“We lived all over the place and moved every two years since Dad was in the military,” she recalls. “Dad fixed military aircraft, so I grew up around helicopters and planes and tanks and we’d always have electronics on the dining table. It’s definitely why I’m an engineer today. It was just normalised for me.”
Her father Ian had joined the military at 16 to learn a trade and became an electrical engineer. “They were young parents with no qualifications. Mum worked in bars and restaurants at night so she could look after my brother Sean and me during the day because childcare was so expensive. We grew up with hard-working parents who were ships in the night. There was always one at work.”
“Dad could fix anything that was broken. And I found that was a superpower. I’d sit with Dad as he figured out what was wrong with something, and then he taught me how he was going to fix it. When I got a bit older, I realised that having broken things could be a real hindrance when you don’t have money. I realised it was a really useful skill to have.”
Dickinson says she was “terrible” at school. “What I learned later in life is that I am a kinaesthetic learner. I learn by doing, not with a three-hour exam. I have quite slow reading and writing skills, because I’m a doer, not a writer. My academic performance was poor,” she shares.
“I stayed at school until I was 18, but I performed terribly. I didn’t get enough qualifications to get into university. Nobody in my life or anybody I knew had ever gone on to even finish high school, never mind tertiary. It wasn’t where kids like us went. We all just got jobs.”
Dickinson got work in a sports store in Chester, northwest England, and had a second job in a bar at night. “While I was working at the sports store, with other people like me on minimum wage, I helped fix broken toasters, washing machines and a lot of people’s cars. I became quite well known at the sports store as the girl who fixes everything. I did it to help pay cheques last a bit longer, because we were all living hand to mouth, pretty much.”
Dickinson went to university through a second-chance scheme and went on to earn a Master of Biomedical Materials Engineering from the University of Manchester and her PhD from Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. In keeping with her “learning by doing”, she made two brand-new discoveries and collaborated with others to write her doctoral thesis.
So, what exactly is nanotechnology and what exactly do Dickinson and her more extroverted teaching alter-ego Nanogirl do? “I build and break tiny things, which are about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a hair,” Dickinson explains.
These tiny things include smart electronics, which are the reason why we can have smartphones in our pockets, when in the 1980s the technology would have filled a room. Nanotechnology has also developed key-hole cameras that have reduced the need for invasive surgery and the science behind microparticles that mean sunscreen doesn’t have to be thick and white anymore. Nanotechnology makes life better for people every day.
Science may happen in a laboratory, but it’s essentially about making lives better. With her twins babbling happily nearby, Dickinson knows this first-hand.
Where to get help
For information on infertility, visit fertilitynz.org.nz. More information is also available at healthnavigator.org.nz. You can find a list of fertility clinics in your area at health.govt.nz.
Photography: Babiche Martens / Hair and makeup: Claudia Rodrigues / Clothing: Shirt from Strangely Normal / Dresses from Kate Sylvester / Styling: Jacqui Loates-Haver