Dr Steph Chaousis speaks with Lumina Gold Coast

TRANSCRIPT

My name is Steph Chaousis and I’m the Partnerships Manager at Datarwe and the Med Tech Program Manager at the Queensland AI Hub.

I honestly knew from a young age that I wanted to be a scientist. I love the idea of discovering new things too, that was a big thing, I thought, how cool to discover something new that no one’s known about before. So I think that’s what really drew me to it.

A couple of yeas ago I was standing on the edge of a boat in Moreton Bay, driving around, chasing turtles to collect samples and now I sit and talk to MedTech companies and ask them about what they’re doing. We now have such advanced technology and science and especially molecular sciences to collect hug amounts of data, and I really got a sense there’s so much meaning locked in this data, but we can’t fully extract it. There’s so much complexity that we can’t fully extract it on our own, as an individual researcher. That’s what Datarwe does, is we’re really working towards connecting all the clinical data and we just think about, what insights are there in those data sets that could bring about new discoveries that actually save lives and help us have a better healthcare system.

A lot of people who live here they do live here for the lifestyle and then try and find job opportunities, but they haven’t always been there, or at least there’s been a sense that jobs in the tech space and all of that haven’t been around. What’s exciting as well about Lumina is that it’s growing, it’s developing. So there are so many opportunities to create something new here. The university is right there, so there’s such a great linkage between talent. Being in this space in such close proximity to lots of different companies has been really fun and really interesting because you literally get to meet new people from different backgrounds every day and then that also can create collaborations.

There’s absolutely lots of opportunities for women. We do have the Young Women Leaders in AI organisation and we run an event every year that’s also up and coming, so that’s a great way to support women in gaining confidence in getting into this field, especially the field I’m in. I’m actually not a programmer, I don’t develop AI, but I still can appreciate the technology and learn how to apply it and I think that’s what I really would like to encourage other women to feel confident in doing. Is you don’t have to be a full techy to get into this space, you can just appreciate the technology and there are so many opportunities.

In terms of healthcare and AI, I think that what we’ll start to see is a more personalised form of healthcare. There is this concept of bringing back the human side and the empathetic side to healthcare when AI can provide really advanced clinical decision support. It’ll make the system more efficient, more personalised, so we just need people who have an appreciation for the ways AI can be used and who are willing to step forward and help move us into that new era of using AI.