Professor Dame Juliet Gerrard, the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Adviser, puts a cellphone on the table in her office. It’s the “batphone” and has stayed silent for some months now.
“It’s my affectionate name for the government phone that I use for secure calls, emergency alerts and secure emails. It’s on 24/7. Just a few people have the number – the PM, ministers and senior officials. It makes a hell of a racket when it goes off.”
Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern was a frequent caller during the height of the Covid-19 emergency. “She’s someone who likes to just call if there’s a question. During Covid, she might contact me a few times a day on a crucial day when she was really trying to line up all the evidence. But obviously, she wouldn’t normally do that.”
Gerrard says she hasn’t been directly involved in emergencies this year. Since Chris Hipkins became prime minister in January, the batphone has been “blissfully quiet”.
I nearly didn’t answer
When Gerrard received news of her appointment in mid-2018, she “put on Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun, very loudly. I’ve always put that on at key moments. That’s my ‘go to’.”
The opportunity to interview for the role came out of the blue. The position was established in 2009 by then prime minister Sir John Key, and the first appointee was Professor Sir Peter Gluckman.
“I got a ‘no caller ID’ phone call that I nearly didn’t answer. And it was the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet saying they wanted me to interview for this role.
“I almost said, ‘Sorry, wrong number’, because I hadn’t even thought about the role. But I think they’d done a bit of a ring round and pulled out some names, and they told me a bit more about it. And then I rang back in the morning and said, ‘I may not have sounded interested, but, having slept on it, I think I am.’ And said, sure I’ll go for an interview.
“The second interview was the one-on-one with the PM. You’re not going to say no to that. And then they rang to see if I was still interested, because I was the preferred person. I was in at the deep end.”
Gerrard had, however, taken soundings from chief science advisers overseas to get some perspective on the role and, when she started in July 2018, tapped into the collective nous of New Zealand’s network of science advisers across government departments and ministries, and the experience of predecessor Gluckman.
“I don’t purport to be the expert across all science. So, I set myself up very much as a bridging function. I’m the person who will go and find the experts, synthesise the evidence with them and maybe help translate it. And I’m the one who sits down with the Prime Minister and checks through it usually.
“It’s an amazing privilege to be able to gather up all that scientific evidence and put it right on the desk of the Prime Minister.”
On paper, the role is to advise the PM on scientific matters and evidence, act as a conduit between the research community and the government, and raise the profile of science in Aotearoa.
When he established the office, Key said he wanted to include science “at the heart of our decision-making”.
“I campaigned on creating this role because I recognise that New Zealand’s prosperity rests on our ability to make full use of the expertise that our scientists can contribute.”
Gerrard spent her first 100 days in the role travelling around the country and listening to where scientists across multiple disciplines thought there was an evidence base that wasn’t being used in policy.
“That coincided with the PM’s parental leave, so it worked quite well. And then she came back and synthesised all my ideas and we had a chat about the work programme.”
Based in Auckland with a small team of seven, Gerrard, 55, is also a professor of biological sciences at the University of Auckland. She specialises in protein biochemistry, investigating protein-to-protein interactions, and applied research in the food industry.
Among her awards is an honorary fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry and her appointment in 2021 as a dame companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to science.
Some of the mahi of the chief science adviser recently has included studies of household food waste, fluoride in drinking water, rethinking plastics and the use of artificial intelligence in delivering better healthcare. The role also encompasses social sciences, such as a project understanding gangs, alongside the science advisers in the ministries of Social Development and Justice.
Science may be a serious subject, and scientists serious people, but that doesn’t preclude a sense of humour. The bell on the unprepossessing front door of the advisor’s suite of offices next to the university’s city campus loudly bongs out the chimes of Big Ben – an impressive welcome bought for just a few dollars at Bunnings, she says.
She points to a photo on the wall of her on arrival in Antarctica, trying to pull a bright-red wheelie suitcase through the ice and snow. “That was a very Bridget Jones moment.” There are bookcases with books read, bookcases with books yet to be read. In her office, psychedelic-looking images of viruses adorn one wall while, above her desk, another photo hangs as a reminder of a voyage on Nasa’s now-retired Boeing 747SP stratospheric telescope. “That was a really memorable occasion. I said I had an appointment with the stratosphere and got out of a dinner.”
Tea and scones
Ardern remembers with warmth the regular Friday meetings she had in her Mt Albert electorate office with Gerrard. Their first meetings were held in the prime minister’s office on the ninth floor of the Beehive but changed to Auckland for “pure convenience”, Ardern says. “While our meetings were every few months, our conversations were more regular, especially during Covid. During the height of the pandemic, there were times when I would have spoken to Dame Juliet daily. She was invaluable to the response, and to me personally.”
Gerrard appreciated the more-relaxed atmosphere of the electorate office, as well as the tea and scones. In the beginning, the meetings were quite formal, with officials sitting in, she says. But after a few meetings, it was just the two of them at Ardern’s constituency office and “as informal as you can be with the Prime Minister”.
“I would have sent paperwork through and she would have a lot of questions, and it would go for 45 minutes.”
During Covid lockdowns, the meetings were held on the phone, and quick calls became more frequent.
Ardern is grateful for Gerrard’s advice and commonsense approach to the science and the pandemic. “We couldn’t have done it without her, I really mean that. Dame Juliet was also tapped into a wider network of scientists, so we were getting an international perspective and critique in real time.
“She was also totally practical. She knew it wasn’t just about the science; she factored in the role human behaviour would play in the success or failure of our response.”
Gerrard’s experience was also called on after the December 2019 Whakaari-White Island eruption, ensuring rescuers could access the island as soon as possible by working with the scientists, especially GNS Science volcanologists Nico Fournier and Graham Leonard.
“She has an incredible mind,” says Ardern, “but it’s the way she makes science so accessible and inclusive that makes her so special as well. She has brought so many people with her in her role – that’s no mean feat.”
Gerrard considers herself fortunate that Ardern wanted to get involved “in the weeds of the science” around Covid-19. “She wanted to understand why sequencing was going to help, how it could support contact tracing, how the virus mutated and how likely that was. She was very engaged.”
Have things changed now Gerrard reports to Prime Minister Chris Hipkins? The two have monthly meetings in the diary, held in person in either Wellington or Auckland. “I already knew him from the Covid response, because we were on the same 11am briefings every day for a year or so. And I’ve still got the relationships with key ministers who receive our current work.”
A big puzzle
Born in Nottingham, Gerrard had a peripatetic upbringing around the UK because her father had many jobs, with the family living in places including Grimsby, Hull, Wiltshire and Wales. Her interest in science was sparked when she was 13 by her Grimsby comprehensive secondary-school chemistry teacher, Mr Parrot. “Most scientists have a favourite science teacher. We had a science curriculum that was very discovery driven, and in the first actual chemistry lesson, he heated lead nitrate and all this brown gas came out. Then he tested all these other gases, and it was like a big puzzle we had to work out.
“He deliberately heated something that was complex to make us see that things are complicated. It really excited me because it wasn’t a case of, ‘this is true, learn this’. It was, ‘Here’s something that’s happening; how do we work out what’s happening? How would you test it?’ And that process of science was really embedded right from the start, so he really encouraged me to get into Oxford.”
Gerrard had to sit an entrance exam and have a “daunting” interview at Oxford to gain admission. She graduated with a BA Hons in chemistry, with distinction in biochemistry, and a DPhil in natural sciences.
She moved to New Zealand with her English partner in 1993 and worked at Crown research institute Crop and Food (now Plant and Food) and had two children. But she missed the “university vibe and all the students” and became an academic at the University of Canterbury in 1998, where she stayed until transferring to Auckland in 2014.
She still works in the schools of biological sciences and chemical sciences. “That’s what I parachute back to when this job finishes. Nominally I’m in this role four days a week. But it generally rounds up to eight days a week.
“I’m not allowed to apply for any research funding, because that is a conflict of interest. I look after, in a collaborative way, my postgraduate students, so they’ve all had co-supervisors. And then I’ve done a little bit of teaching.”
Gerrard likes cooking, reading, film and theatre. “I’ve got a bach on Great Barrier Island that I’ve been doing up. That’s been my main relaxation during this job.”
Beyond an individual
Former chief science adviser Gluckman believes New Zealand is better off for having the role and a team of advisers working at the science and policy nexus.
“Most people look at New Zealand and say the model has been successful. It’s successful because it succeeded beyond an individual and their personality.
“Success will be best seen post-Juliet, to be honest. The next government, the next science adviser, the process of appointment will get to be more robust. Mine was very informal. Juliet’s was semi-formal.”
Gerrard says Gluckman’s “great legacy” was establishing a network of chief science advisers in ministries and departments, who work independently of her.
“They work for the public service, and I work for a politician. What I do is chair what we call the chief science adviser forum once a month. It’s a community of practice and we swap notes, we make sure that when we might be advising from slightly different perspectives or reaching slightly different conclusions, we’re all aware of that. That’s how science works.”
Research, Science and Innovation Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall would not say if she thought the network was working well or comment on Gerrard’s performance in case it came across as a reference, “which ministers are not permitted to make”.
Gerrard says even though there has been progress, New Zealand faces significant challenges in the science sector, which the Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways white paper has highlighted, such as greater inclusivity and encouraging higher levels of participation by women and Māori and Pasifika. There needs to be more support for early-career researchers, and the Crown research institutes and research priorities need overhauling.
With an election looming in October, it will be the incoming prime minister’s decision whether Gerrard will have a third three-year term when her second finishes in June next year. “It’s slightly skewed from the election cycle. It’s obviously up to the prime minister, and it might be that they’re looking for some different balance of skills or just some fresh thinking.”
She does not want to talk about her intentions for the job. “The most frustrating thing for me personally in science is when debates get so polarised and all the wisdom is in the middle in the nuance. Especially with social media and soundbite headlines, it’s very frustrating when you’re trying to see all sides and unpack an issue, but you’re being pushed into one corner or another.
“But this job is never boring. And, in contrast to an academic role, you can make a difference in pretty short order. I’m a people person, and what a privilege to meet all these incredible scientists from all sorts of disciplines. It’s just a dream come true.”