2019

Professor Maria Kavallaris AM
Bachelor of Applied Science (Biomedical),1989

Director, Australian Centre for NanoMedicine and Professor and Head of Tumour Biology and Targeting program, Children’s Cancer Institute
The problem with chemotherapy and other cancer treatments, says Professor Maria Kavallaris AM, is that they’re a kind of “bucket chemistry” — effective, but imprecise. 

“The drugs are toxic, that’s why they work on cancer,” she says. “Cancer cells tend to be more rapidly dividing and more vulnerable to being killed but, as a consequence, normal cells that also need to divide regularly get badly damaged too.” 

For patients, this means hair loss, a suppressed immune system and, possibly, lifelong side effects. 

Kavallaris has personal experience of this ‘collateral damage’, having been diagnosed with cancer at 21. Not one to give up, she juggled treatment with her undergraduate studies and work as a laboratory technician at the Children’s Cancer Institute. 
Some 35 years later, she remains at the institute, where she oversees a team of 24 researchers and works on a range of projects, from looking at the causes of tumour growth to drug resistance. 

An expert in cancer nanomedicine, Kavallaris has also been investigating new delivery methods for anti-cancer treatments, including drugs that would directly target tumour cells, sparing healthy ones. Her work so far has attracted an incredible $45 million in funding. 

But Kavallaris is most proud of co-founding the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine in 2011. Since then, the interdisciplinary team has grown to more than 130 chemists, engineers, scientists, oncologists and clinicians, and has changed the way this kind of work is done in Australia. 

“At the time, engineers and chemists were creating these clever things then saying to us, ‘Oh, we think you could use it for cancer,’” she says. Her team would run tests but the product often didn’t satisfy basic standards, such as toxicity testing. 

“It’s not because they hadn’t created something fantastic,” says Kavallaris, “but because they were designing things then saying to us, ‘Can you fit it in your system?’ Our vision was to tackle nanomedicine from a disease perspective: to start with the problem and work backwards.”

Annabelle Sheehan
Bachelor of Communication (Film Production and Film Studies), 1981
CEO, New Zealand Film Commission

A film buff from an early age, Annabelle Sheehan was raised on whatever gems free-to-air TV had to offer in the 1970s — mostly relics from Hollywood’s golden age, featuring the likes of Fred Astaire, Cary Grant and Shirley Temple. 

“I used to say a misspent youth is the best way you can prepare for a film career,” she laughs. After graduating from UTS, Sheehan went into post-production, working on films such as Mad Max 2, Dead Calm and The Piano. Next, she took up academic roles, serving as a department head at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. Then she reinvented herself once more, this time as a talent agent, representing Cate Blanchett and Ben Mendelsohn as CEO of RGM Artist Group. 

“My interest in film was never just about making films, but in thinking about them,” she says of her diverse career. “UTS taught me to look at the industry from a big, broad perspective. It was strong on analysing social structures, feminism and communications theory — things I still think about today.” 

In 2018, after serving as CEO of the South Australian Film Corporation, Sheehan took on her current role: CEO of the New Zealand Film Commission. Over the next year, she’s determined to boost gender equality and get more Māori stories on the big screen. 

Sheehan is known for her pragmatism — a product, she says, of a decade in the fast-paced world of a talent agency. “I’m interested in processes, that goes back to my communications degree, but we also have to ensure things happen,” she says. 

“We have to spend money, encourage filmmakers, and partner with the people for whom it really matters.”

Brendan Lonergan
Master of Business (Marketing), 2006
CEO, Beehive Industries

When Brendan Lonergan took the reins at Beehive Industries, a ‘business with purpose’ that specialises in packaging, assembly and distribution services, things were fairly dire: the social enterprise was bleeding cash and the accountants told him the organisation would be lucky to survive more than a year. 

That was five years ago. Today, annual turnover is up 360 per cent and the not-for-profit supports 250 ‘Beehivers’ who include seniors, those living with disability, and the long-term unemployed. Jobs on the organisation’s factory floor fund meals, activities and support programs for members, including cooking classes and English lessons. 

So how did Lonergan do it? “A lot of phone calls, a lot of negotiation and a hell of a lot of meetings,” he laughs. 

Lonergan is a natural salesman, a skill he honed over two decades as a co-owner of what became Australia’s biggest music merchandise manufacturer. When he took the job at Beehive, he had two goals: bigger clients and better training. At that point, most of the work done at Beehive involved folding and sending letters, plus basic packaging and assembly tasks. 

“The piece rate for that kind of work is very low, which means you’ve got to do a heck of a lot to make any money at all,” he says. “And if you’re taking up too much production time doing below-value work, you’ll never make a decent return.” 

So Lonergan set his sights on more complex jobs requiring computers and software. He approached Telstra and, after much convincing, landed a contract to put together SIM card kits. 

“It’s quite technical work but we maintained 100 per cent data integrity,” he says. That relationship, which continues today, helped him get other big firms on board. 
All going well, Beehive will be entirely self-funded within the next 12 months. Not only that, Lonergan hopes to expand the organisation’s reach and alleviate social isolation with more online programs, such as the livestream cooking classes for seniors he currently runs with former MasterChef contestant Kumar Pereira.

Yiying Lu
Bachelor of Design (Visual Communication), 2008
Artrepreneur

She’s the creative genius behind the dumpling emoji and Twitter’s infamous Fail Whale, but there’s much more to Yiying Lu’s story. 
Raised in Shanghai, Lu came to Australia to study design and is now working with tech startups in Silicon Valley. An ‘artrepreneur’, she’s on a mission to bridge cultural divides, from art to tech and East to West. 

Between branding work and exhibitions, Lu gives public addresses and runs online classes, teaching creatives how to design for a global audience. She’s also working on a picture book, The Very Hungry Red Panda. 

“People say to me, ‘I’ve finished school, how do I get a job?’” she says. “When I look back, I realise I never actually found a job.” 

Lu may not have sent out CVs, but she’s incredibly good at leveraging social media and monetising her work. By the second year of her degree, she was already licensing her designs to companies such as the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium and one of the world’s biggest games corporations. 

When Disney opened a resort in Shanghai in 2016, they hired Lu to localise their campaign material. Her take on Mickey, while undeniably Disney, is in the style of a Chinese paper-cut figure, complete with traditional motifs. 

“I wanted to do the seemingly impossible: unify something that’s so global, but also local. I wanted to find that common voice while keeping what is unique about the location,” she says.

From logos to wall stickers, Lu’s quirky creations speak to people all over the world. This, she says, is the beauty of being a designer rather than an artist. 

“I create for communication’s sake,” she says. “It’s about understanding what the audience wants and what the client wants. I’m a vessel, helping these two things connect. In a lot of art and design, the voice overshadows the subject matter — that’s not communication.”

Dr Ashod Donikian
PhD Engineering, 2010; Graduate Certificate in Research Commercialisation, 2008; Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical), 2003

GPS plays a central role in modern life, but the technology — developed in the 1960s for military use — isn’t really suited to the age of the smartphone, argues robotics engineer Dr Ashod Donikian. 

“It wasn’t built for using indoors or in dense city areas,” he says, “and it has a very low power signal because it’s meant to be invisible to enemies.”
For his PhD, Donikian tasked himself with inventing a locationtracking system that would not only work inside, but could be used to find firefighters in a burning building. 

The best sensor, he decided, is the one in your pocket: your smartphone. Using machine-learning algorithms, he created a technology that harnesses a device’s inbuilt accelerometers and gyroscopes to provide a 3D-navigation tool. It’s location and motion mapping without the need for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or GPS. 

Upon receiving his PhD, Donikian took his life-saving tech to Silicon Valley. 

“It was clear no-one cared about the firefighter example,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Are you crazy? Google needs this, Apple needs this, Uber needs this.’” 

At the time, Donikian was sleeping in his car and pitching to anyone who would listen. First responders, it turns out, aren’t early adopters. 

“Once we’re trusted by the commercial market, we can go into this smaller, adjacent one,” he says. 

Today, Donikian’s company, Navisens, employs nine engineers and licenses the technology to app developers who require location tracking, be it for maps, ride-sharing services or delivering goods. 

While the company is still at startup stage, Donikian is in talks with some major tech companies — but until there’s a deal in place for his game-changing location platform, he’s keeping that information close to his chest.

Brooke Boney
Bachelor of Communication (Journalism), 2014
Entertainment reporter on Nine Network's Today show

Earlier this year, journalist Brooke Boney swapped the cutthroat world of news and politics for the cutthroat world of breakfast TV. Just days into her new job as Today’s entertainment reporter, she was asked for her thoughts on Change the Date, a campaign to move Australia Day from the date of the First Fleet’s arrival in Sydney. 

All smiles, Boney cut to the chase. “This is the best country in the world, no doubt,” she said. “But I can’t separate the 26th of January from the fact that my brothers are more likely to go to jail than they are to go to school, or that my little sisters and my mum are more likely to be beaten and raped than anyone else’s sisters and mum, and that started from that day.” 

The backlash was fierce and Boney, a Gamilaroi Gomeroi woman, admits it was hard to take. “When you say something that’s important and heartfelt, you want people to really hear you. That was the difficult part: realising that you don’t have a lot of control over the narrative once it’s out there, in the world.” 

Still, she’s embraced the chance to speak to a mass audience, even if that audience is vastly different to those who tuned in to Triple J, NITV, SBS and the ABC, where she previously held roles as a news presenter and political correspondent. It’s part of what drew her to study journalism — the chance to be part of the conversation, rather than reading about it. 

But getting a seat at the table wasn’t easy for Boney, the first in her family to go to university. “If you haven’t seen it done before, you don’t think of university as being an institution for you,” she says. 

A spokesperson for the GO Foundation, which creates opportunities for Indigenous youth through education, Boney encourages others to follow her lead. “Once Indigenous kids get through post-secondary education, we actually do better,” she says. “But we need to be able to imagine it.”

Jim White
Master of Education (Adult Education), 1996
Senior Vice-President of Human Resources, Paramount Pictures

In 1994, after attending his first lecture at UTS, HR executive and social advocate Jim White was pulled aside by the Dean, who said to him, “Why are you here? I don’t mean to offend you, but we don’t get many American students here.” 

White’s reply? “That’s exactly why I’m here.” 

He explains: “I could have applied for Cambridge or gone to Oxford; schools that everybody else goes to. But the fact is UTS has an amazing education program, particularly in terms of diversity and inclusion, and there aren’t many Americans who’ve done it, which means I have very unique, specialised experience.” 
At the time, White was Vice-President of Human Resources at Blockbuster. He’d been spending time in Australia, assisting with the chain’s local rollout. 

In some ways, this was a return to the past for the senior executive, who’d worked behind the counter at a ‘mom and pop’ video store while completing his undergraduate degree in Nebraska in the 1980s. 

“I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was one of the few people on the planet who really understood video stores,” he says. 

After agreeing to work for Blockbuster in Australia, White took the opportunity to further his education at UTS. 

Some 35 years later, White is still in the entertainment industry. Today, he’s Senior Vice-President of Human Resources at Paramount Pictures, where a background in business — “I evolved my HR skills along the way” — makes him a unique hire. 

White assists with restructures and sourcing executive talent, but also acts as a business counsellor, helping senior executives make operational decisions. 

The role at Paramount brought him to Los Angeles and, in turn, set him on a mission to combat homelessness. 

“I actually ended up living near Skid Row, an area of extreme poverty,” he says. “When I went out in the evening for the first time, there were roughly 2000 people sleeping on the street.” 

Today, he represents the entertainment industry on the Business Leaders Task Force, a group that works with various sectors to come up with housing solutions. Over the past decade, it’s helped house thousands of LA residents. 

White sits on several boards and undertakes pro bono HR work, but he says the task force, with its unique take on poverty, has been the most effective. 

“We look at how homelessness impacts businesses from a monetary perspective,” he says. “We’re not saying the humanitarian part isn’t important, but we’re getting business leaders to understand that, as taxpayers, we pay for this anyway — and the way we’re currently spending that money isn’t smart.”

Annette Bennett
Master of Midwifery (Research), 2015
Maternal health adviser, scholarship coordinator and Ebola preparedness trainer, Samaritan’s Purse

Based in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, midwife and nurse Annette Bennett has a somewhat restricted life: she and her husband live in a compound, they have an 8pm curfew and Bennett isn’t allowed to drive. 

Having spent 20 years in Africa, she’s used to safety precautions, but she admits her present role is the most challenging yet. 

Bennett has been upskilling young midwives and onboarding established professionals at a bare-bones hospital in the country’s remote north-east, a region prone to instability. While she speaks some Arabic (a legacy of the decade she spent in Egypt, running a clinic for refugees), there are several more languages to contend with in South Sudan, plus a patriarchal society resistant to change. Not to mention the threat of Ebola, which is endemic in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

In many ways, Bennett is starting all over again in South Sudan after making significant gains for midwives, and the mothers and newborns in their care, in Ethiopia. 
In 2006, as the founding Dean of the Hamlin College of Midwives, she established Ethiopia’s first fully accredited, direct-entry Bachelor of Midwifery course. Awarding scholarships to young women in rural areas, she provided hands-on training with plenty of post-graduation support. Delivering safer beginnings. 
In return, students agreed to go back to their home town to work. It was a completely new approach in a country where, at the time, 99 per cent of midwifery students were males from urban areas. 

“The government would send these midwives to a remote area, one at a time, with a population of up to 200,000 to care for,” says Bennett. “They didn’t speak the local language and they weren’t accepted by the community. Any pregnant women who did come to the health centre usually did so because they were at death’s door.” 

As a result, many midwives would leave before the end of their contract. 

Today, the Hamlin College of Midwives continues to turn out highly skilled professionals. The college does not take in huge cohorts and the number of graduates is modest, but these midwives are leaders in their profession. Some have gone on to complete a master’s degree or work as mentors and academics. 

Others have transformed healthcare for mothers and newborns in their home towns. In Burrakat in Ethiopia’s remote Amhara region, for example, the health centre used to deliver one or two babies a month, says Bennett, and survival rates were dismal. 

“Within seven years, our midwives were managing around 900 births a year, with not one maternal mortality.”

Sarah Dale
Bachelor of Laws, 2011
Principal Solicitor, Refugee Advice and Casework Service (RACS)

Asked what she con siders the biggest achievement of her career, solicitor Sarah Dale describes the situation facing more than 20 unaccompanied teenage asylum seekers on Christmas Island in 2014. 

“For 18 months, they’d wake up every morning, dreading that this would be the day they’d be transferred to Nauru,” she says. “We were told by very senior lawyers and senior counsel that there was nothing we could do, but we decided there had to be an alternative.” 

Dale’s organisation, Refugee Advice and Casework Service (RACS), made a complaint to the United Nations — a bold move by the then 27-year-old, who’d been admitted as a lawyer just two years earlier. 

But Dale was no stranger to tough cases, having spent her graduate years representing juvenile offenders. In the end, the teens on Christmas Island were released into the community to start the process of applying for protection in Australia. 

“We’ll never know exactly why, but I think it was a mix of public and legal advocacy,” says Dale. 

As for her biggest challenge, Dale points to 2017, when it was announced that asylum seekers who had arrived by boat after August 2012 had just five months left to lodge a visa application. 

Many had only recently been invited to apply, and the small team at RACS already had a waitlist in the thousands. It was an intense but rewarding five months for Dale, who was charged with coordinating the legal team. 

“We had to rally together with many of Sydney’s top-tier law firms; we had volunteers by the hundreds,” she says. “Remarkably, despite the fact there were close to 28,000 people needing help, only 77 missed the deadline.”

Pandora Shelley
Bachelor of Business (Management Consulting and Marketing), 2014
CEO, Fishburners

In just eight years, Pandora Shelley went from being the office manager at startup hub Fishburners to company CEO. In that time, she helped the not-for-profit foster the growth of more than 2000 tech businesses, creating more than 2500 jobs and generating over $110 million in revenue. 

The organisation, which runs co-working spaces and events for entrepreneurs in Sydney, Brisbane and Shanghai, recorded unprecedented growth during her tenure. 

And yet, at meetings with external companies, the 28-year-old CEO was often overlooked. 

“I got asked to take notes — numerous times,” she says. On occasion, she would call out inappropriate behaviour; other times, she’d settle for proving them wrong. 
Entering the startup world was a leap of faith for Shelley, who describes herself as risk averse. So much so, she considers her legacy at Fishburners to be a culture of data-driven decision making. “It got to a point that for almost every dollar and every hour we spent on a project, we had data to back it up.” 

Earlier this year, Shelley took another leap into the unknown, leaving the organisation for New York. 

“Honestly, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “But I was very clear that I would be CEO for one year. When that time was up, I had achieved all the things I’d wanted to achieve.” 

So what’s next? At this stage, she can’t say too much — only that she’s not done with startups just yet.

Anntonette Dailey
Bachelor of Engineering (Civil and Environmental), 2008; Diploma in Professional Engineering Practice, 2008
Executive Director, Australian Space Agency

At 36, Anntonette Dailey has what she considers to be one of the best jobs in the world: Executive Director at the Australian Space Agency. 

As a senior leader at the agency, she and her colleagues are working to grow the local space industry. And they have big plans. First up, there’s the construction of a space discovery centre in Adelaide, plus Australia’s first mission control. In time, Anntonette plans to partner with the commercial sector to get Australian rockets taking off from Australian launching pads. 

But one of her primary goals is to convince the Australian public that space is worth investing in. 

“People don’t realise that it affects almost every part of our lives,” she says. “I guarantee that I could tell most people how space applies to their job. It’s essential to everything from banking to monitoring water flow and helping farmers do better cropping.” 

Dailey’s love of all things spacerelated dates back to her teen years, when she attended space camps and idolised Australian astronaut and engineer Dr Andy Thomas AO. 

As a graduate, Dailey took up policy roles that utilised her environmental engineering skills, from running a wild dog abatement program to assisting with the Cyclone Yasi recovery effort. 

Now that she has her dream job, Dailey wants more women to join her in the space sector. She’s proud of the fact her agency’s leadership team is 50 per cent female — a drastic change from the early days of her career. 

“I remember going to my first space industry board meeting and everyone there was a man over the age of 45,” she says. “When I was about 30, I realised why I’d been struggling to create a career path: it was because I just couldn’t see myself reflected in the leadership at the time.”