Stories from Beyond Academia #5: Phil Dooley
PhD in Physics
From a PhD to … juggling in a billion dollar nuclear fusion device?!
Yes, you read that right. And you should keep reading, because that’s just one of the many anecdotes and antics discussed in this story from beyond academia!
Here we introduce Dr Phil Dooley - he’s a PhD in Physics, a musician, a juggler, and something of an ‘oxymoron’ (you’ll see).
After his PhD, Phil worked in the music industry, as a software trainer, in a media office, and now as a science communicator, including hosting science sing-a-long gigs in the pub!
This interview explores the cornucopia of non-academic, post-PhD roles that Phil has held, and has a lot of fun along the way! Enjoy!
Jonathan McGuire: Hi Phil, thanks very much for joining me! I’m looking forward to talking about your background, what you’re doing now, and the academia to non-academic work transition. To start, I'd like to go back to when you were studying, could you tell us a bit about what field you were in for your PhD? What were you researching and are there any findings you could mention?
Phil Dooley: As a kid, I always wanted to be an astronomer. But when I got to uni, that didn't happen - some work experience put me off and I found myself on a much more practical side, doing laser physics. That was a lab-based PhD, so a lot of time with screwdriver in hand, adjusting components and aligning lasers and moving mirrors around. Which I didn't realise I was good at, but it turned out I was! The actual content was looking at oxygen in the ultraviolet. Similar to what's going on in the upper atmosphere where ultraviolet from the sun is hitting the atmosphere. Oxygen (O2) breaks apart into two oxygens, the ultraviolet actually breaks the bond, and one of those single oxygens runs away and finds an O2 and then forms O3, and that's how ozone is formed in the upper atmosphere. The span of the ultraviolet that comes from the sun is hundreds of nanometers. But I did about a five nanometer band, it had never been looked at with laser light before which is very narrow, so we could get very high precision spectra (spectroscopy). Nowadays you can just buy a laser that does that off the shelf, whereas back then I had to do all these tricks to try and take a low energy visible red laser and turn it into a UV laser.
And the output was one number, it was a coupling constant between bound oxygen and oxygen that's flown apart. And that, maybe, got put into some atmospheric model somewhere; something that tells scientists a little bit about how the atmosphere functions. So in terms of big, sweeping changes? No, not at all. And it was a tough experience for me, I've got to say. My supervisors were not great and overcommitted me with what they asked for - I ended up with a very, very good PhD with a lot of data when I could have got a ‘get by’ PhD with much less data. And that meant it took me a year and a half longer than it should have, and I ran out of money, and had to work second jobs, and put stress on my marriage and all the rest.
JM: I'm glad that I got one of those ‘just good enough’ PhDs! That sounds pretty stressful, did you stay in academia after that experience?
PD: I ran a mile. Actually I ran about 3000 miles, to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands.
JM: Oh wow. What were you doing there?
PD: My wife had always wanted to do development work. And she’d been sitting around waiting for me to finish my PhD. When I finally finished she signed us up for Australian Volunteers Abroad (as it was called back then; it’s changed names since) and she got a posting looking after an endangered bird in Rarotonga. Which was a great experience for her. I turned up with a PhD in Physics on a small island with 4000 people saying “hey, any jobs in laser physics?” And there weren't, surprisingly. So I rewrote my CV for teaching. But no maths or science teacher positions were available right then - it was just a quirk of the calendar, the year that we arrived they had a big intake from New Zealand through another program of some kind. Anyway, whatever it was, there were no jobs in that. So then I rewrote my CV for IT, because in a physics PhD I’d been writing code to analyze things and obviously had to write up a thesis - desktop publishing was a lot harder back then, pulling together a thesis with lots of chapters in LaTeX in the 90s was a little bit epic. I'd also worked on some of the interfacing of the controls for the computer to the experiment, so I had enough to scrape past. Certainly on Rarotonga, I was a very rare commodity and so I managed to land a job at a bank there running their IT systems. I was the IT Director, at 0.5FTE because it was a half-time job.
JM: Straight into the deep end, in a way…
PD: Yeah, sure was. There was a guy there who was just going back to England, he'd been there for a few years, so fortunately we had a couple of months of changeover where he threw everything at me. And then the idea was I was supposed to make myself redundant and teach some locals which I did, I think - I don't know how well they went after I left, but I certainly spent as much time as I could trying to upskill them and get them doing all the tasks, running the backups, doing the monthly reports.
JM: Aside from rewriting your CV a couple of times, was there anything specific that you did to prep for going into non-academic work?
PD: No. At that stage I was so burnt out that I was just like, “get me out of here”. It was really kind of in desperation that I started thinking about what I could say about my IT skills. And that may have even been only once I was there - I can't remember if it was just before I left or when I was there already.
JM: And so after Rarotonga, what was next?
And it was interesting because I had a major piece of luck - or was it just looking for the right opportunity?
PD: That was such a gateway for me into IT. Because I'd had a reasonably responsible position in IT, and this was the 90s so it was the IT bubble, and I was like, “Okay, I'm gonna make my fortune doing IT”. And it was interesting because I had a major piece of luck - or was it just looking for the right opportunity? Anyway, I was also a musician. While I was there (in Rarotonga), I was 20 hours a week in the IT job and the rest of the time I spent writing and recording an album of fairly bad pop music, using a small music setup: a microphone and a little tiny MIDI sound box that I'd taken with me. So when I came back, I wanted to get into the music industry, and so I was looking for a job in the music industry that does IT. So I ended up working for APRA - the Australian Performing Right Association - who distribute all the royalties to songwriters. That was cool - I just kind of opened the papers, thought that I'd like to work for maybe APRA, and there was a job for APRA right there.
JM: The synchronicity!
PD: Yeah, and I was there for a couple of years but I didn't really fit in culturally. Although I wanted to be a musician, I still came from that academic background and everybody else was very much musical, which is a slightly different scene - a bit more artsy, a bit more grungy, a bit more drinking, smoking, taking drugs, staying out late kind of thing, and I felt like a bit of a fearful nerd amongst them. In the end I moved to Fuji Xerox, where I was doing software training. Teaching was an option I nearly went for a number of times. I've got the papers to do a DipEd (Diploma of Education) but I've just never gone ahead with it - I think because once you've done a PhD, you don't really feel like doing any more study. So this job as a professional trainer in an IT company came up and I thought that would be really exciting because I had this amazing, idealistic idea of having peers working with me on education, we would be looking at each other's training, and learning from each other skills, and upskilling. And it wasn't really like that at all - we pretty much went into our own classrooms and did our own things. But nonetheless I had fun trying to be as creative as possible, coming up with games to get people up and moving and that kind of stuff.
JM: That’s a really good segue into the work that you do now - the stuff you're doing sounds really exciting, creative and just fun. Can you tell us a bit about how you got into science communication, which you've been doing for a while now, and what you’re doing on a daily basis?
PD: So the story actually starts when both my parents passed away in quick succession. At their funerals, I very much reevaluated where my life was going. And I thought, “What the hell am I doing teaching people to print bank statements and phone bills when I really love the science?” But I'm not my dad, who was a government academic geophysicist. I’m more my mum who was a musician, extrovert, people-person. And I’d already thought about doing science communication back in the day – I applied for a Questacon course and I didn’t get in. That's actually before I did my PhD, so I went and did the PhD as a kind of consolation prize. And at dad's funeral, particularly listening to his colleagues speak about his quiet, methodical science, I thought how that's actually not me, and how I really am into science communication and I really want to do it. So that was a big transition. That took about eight months.
Fortunately, I was a valuable commodity at Xerox – it was quite funny because I was teaching this very top-end product that cost customers hundreds of thousands of dollars, and people would spend $5,000 to come to a training course with me for a week. Which I thought was just ludicrous, but that's why I felt I had to try and do a good job. I remember somebody coming up to me and saying, “So where were you in Xerox before you started teaching? You don't just walk in off the street and start teaching this product called Autograph?” And I said, “Yeah, that's pretty much what I did. I mean I did a bit of coding at uni, and I did a PhD in physics….” and they kind of went “Ah, ok”. I was telling somebody else about blah, blah, blah, Dr Phil, blah, blah. And she said “yeh, right” and then later on she went past my desk and I had my PhD propped up on a shelf and she was just like, “Oh, really!? Oh. I thought you were kidding.” So I mean, I guess having the PhD does open some doors from that point of view. When you're in an intellectual arena people just go “okay, you can probably do it”. So it took me a long time to make the transition.
I guess for people who are going to make the transition, my tip would be to just reach out to everybody you can think of, and all your friends and say to them, “Hey, do you know anybody?” and then you go and talk to people. I went and did a day with the CSIRO education team. I managed to get a bit of time with Dr Karl, and that looked like it was going to lead to something - I ended up working with him at ABC for a little while, but then that ended. I did a little journalism course, I did some community radio volunteer stuff, I did all kinds of things and eventually one of them came good. Sort of randomly, out of nowhere, somebody sent me this link letting me know that Sydney Uni was looking for a physics science communicator. And because I'd put myself out there enough that they knew who I was, I was able to get in and get that job and so that was kind of my first foothold doing the real paid thing. Which was fun, but also huge: science communication is a small field, and most of the people in it have come from very disparate backgrounds. You have some academics who've come into it, you have some who've been journalists, others who've been graphic designers but they decided they like science more so they become scientific graphic designers. And all of these people end up mashed up in the middle. And so when you work in this field, you end up having to do the web stuff, and run the events, and maybe do some education, and write the stories for the website, and make videos these days, and do all the social media, and that's more than one person can really cope with.
JM: It’s fascinating to me that all these people from these very different backgrounds come into the same gig. Do you feel like the people from the academic background kind of brought a different style to the people who came from a journalistic background, for example?
PD: Yeah, absolutely. I came from an academic background, but I was always really interested in teaching and tutoring and so I had a sense that there were other people out there and you had to work out what they needed to hear. Which is the biggest stumbling block of most science communication - people assume that what you want to tell them is what people want to hear. Now I regularly interview physicists, and the ability to take them on and talk about electron clouds and quantum wave functions and hybrid baryonic particles or whatever is really good, but then I need to walk away and say “that jargon word goes, that jargon word goes, that jargon word goes” - it’s a sort of translation into English from some other language.
JM: It's almost a walking in two worlds thing, you’ve got to be able to switch between those languages. So when you're actually doing your presentations, your talks, putting together articles based on those interviews, who are your audiences? What sort of stuff are you communicating?
PD: It's really varied. A lot of what I've ended up focusing on is actually working with academics and trying to inspire them to be a bit more creative with what they do. I've been on this journey, coming from the hard sciences and thinking, “What good are the arts?” to actually going “Wait a minute, I really like watching shows on Netflix!” And that's actors and storytellers - you want to engage with it, it draws you in. As opposed to the science communication model of, “Here. I've got some facts. Let me jam them down your throat.” So now my big thing is we have to engage the arts because that's what humans engage with. And we have to be able to tell a story and understand how stories work. And we have to be able to include beauty, and characters, and journeys and all of that stuff that humans relate to, if we're going to engage people about science.
And we have to be able to tell a story and understand how stories work. And we have to be able to include beauty, and characters, and journeys and all of that stuff that humans relate to, if we're going to engage people about science.
JM: Speaking of the arts, you have been ‘dobbed in’ as being a bit of a triple threat: having some musical skills – acting, singing, maybe even some juggling skills?
PD: Ah, the juggling bit. Yeah, that's quite funny. So I always loved sport - I played a lot of cricket, I was a wicketkeeper so catching and throwing was definitely my thing. And I taught myself to juggle - just up to three, I can't do any of the really big circus, six or seven stuff. But it actually ended up in my professional career. After I finished at Sydney Uni I got a job at the world's biggest nuclear fusion experiment in England, called JET. There’s a bigger one being built in the south of France, but at the moment, and for the last 30 years, JET has been the biggest one. And nuclear fusion is the idea of trying to get hydrogen very hot, so the hydrogens collide and form helium and then you get a lot of energy out of that. And to make that happen, you need three things: you need to have temperature, you need to have the right density of hydrogens so you get collisions, and then you need to hold them together for a certain amount of time - what's called the confinement time. And so those three things got multiplied together by some guy a while back called Lawson, the Lawson criteria turned into a figure of merit called the triple product.
One of the PR people over in England said to me, “I've always wanted to do this thing juggling. Can you juggle?” and I went, “Uh, yeah”. And then next thing, I was inside the JET replica – so JET is a doughnut shaped chamber, about four and a half meters across, which they heat up to 150 million degrees. And the replica is a practice vessel they use when they need to go in to do services and things. So there I was in the replica, all dressed up in my PPE as if I was really inside the JET, juggling a clock that was the confinement time, a green ball so they could green screen on a sun and that was the heat. And the third thing was the pressure. And, as it happened, I’d recently seen a video of ‘The Curiosity Show’, the big science show from the 70s – it was these two dudes from Adelaide, and they're still around; I actually interviewed them recently – and they had done this thing about the atmosphere and vacuums and things and they'd used 100s and 1000s as air particles. So we got this idea that I would have this clear plastic ball filled with 100s and 1000s as the third thing I'm juggling. So that, the clock and the green ball. So part of the play here was that because I couldn't juggle that well, I dropped one of them. And then I'd say “Oh, look, we've dropped the clock. And that means the confinement time - we haven't managed to hold it together and that's why the fusion didn’t work. But if we could get all of them going at once…” Blah, blah, blah. So I drop the clock and the glass face of that shatters. There's now broken glass all over the billion dollar test vessel of JET. And what do you think happens next? Of course I drop the ball with 100s & 1000s in it, it splits apart, 100s & 1000s throughout. They’ve fallen down through the cracks of the plasma device. So when they come to rip this thing apart in the future they’re really going to wonder why on earth there are 100s & 1000s everywhere….
JM: I was going to ask you whether you incorporate any art stuff into your science shows - sounds like maybe that's a riskier proposition than I’d considered!
PD: Well, I hadn't done the risk assessment for that, I must say! That's a big part of science communication now if you're going to be doing demos, you always have to have risk assessments. These days I generally stick to music, that's something I've always done. I wanted to be a musician, wanted to be a rock star, studied classical piano. And again, it was in England I saw this guy do this - the science communication scene there was very inspiring - this guy walked in with an amp and an electric guitar plugged in and started playing Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. And he put the words up on the screen. Except they weren't the original words, they were words about quantum physics. And we all knew the tune, so the audience just sang along, talking about alternate universes and all of this stuff. And it was just genius, and so I had to steal that idea.
That's what I do in my pub gigs, I put the words up, I play a song that everybody knows like, ‘Hey, Jude’, but when I do it it's about Pluto so it’s called ‘Hey Plute”. And it’s about how can Pluto win his way back into the solar system, into the planet club. So that's what I try and do, get the audience singing. Because there's magic that happens when humans sing together. It's actually quite a bonding and uplifting experience. So if I can get people feeling that way while they're in a science context, they're going to walk away thinking science is fun and heartwarming and delightful and all of those things that it often isn't. At least if you take a scientific approach to it, which is being cold and objective and showing no human qualities at all, which is what good science is striving for. But good communication is not that. And a lot of people don’t get that.
JM: I love you bringing that human and interactive element in, because people are going to remember singing along, they're going to go home and think about the words, and maybe actually remember it more accurately than if they just listened to someone talk about it. I'm wondering, aside from being able to say “Hi, I'm Dr. Phil” and knowing the physics jargon, what else do you think you bring from the scientific background that helps you be a really good science communicator?
PD: Sort of the broader understanding of the field. I have interviewed many, many scientists in… I guess I've been a full-time science writer now for about 12 years. And I have become a better, more well-rounded scientist than I was when I was doing my PhD, even though I haven't published another peer reviewed paper and I haven't done any research. But now I see the links between this field and that field, and I see the techniques that people use for theoretical approaches and computational approaches and experimental approaches, and I kind of get it now. So that really makes things a lot easier. Also when I was in the ANU media office, my boss was a former Reuters journalist. And he'd done amazing things. He’d been on the plane with the Prime Minister going to the Japanese Prime Minister's funeral and things like that. So he'd been right up there, and he drilled into me all these really good journalistic things. He said, “You are always writing for your audience. You must know what your audience want and doesn't want”. Too many people want to tell you what they know, which may or may not be of interest or of relevance. I maybe underestimate the power of the PhD and the background knowledge in physics, but I feel I have to temper it. When I was in the media office, I was working across all sciences, and so I'd be writing environment things, earth science things, biochemistry - my God, that is hard! That is so much harder than quantum physics, let me tell you.
JM: You’re going to be in trouble at the physics club after saying that!
PD: That’s my job, to be in trouble with the physics club! But yes, that was the kind of thing where I was on the other side saying, “Well, I really don't understand what you're telling me. And you're going to have to go back a step” but at least I could also say “but, I've got a ‘D’ and an ‘R’ in front of my name: I have a PhD so you must know that I'm not dumb, which means the onus is on you to make it simple enough for me to understand.” As Dr. Karl says, you need to assume that your audience is very intelligent but completely uninformed. And to all of the people doing PhDs out there, it gets tough and at the end of it, you come out, you are smart, but you feel dumb. So for example, I knew probably more about that particular bit of oxygen than anyone else in the world. But I felt like I was stupid. Which makes me, I think, an oxymoron!
JM: I can really relate to that - I studied moral decision making, and when I left I was like, “Well, where are the jobs in moral decision making? Am I going to go to a company and tell them that they've been naughty?” I felt like I knew an awful lot about this very specific cognitive process, and nothing else. One final question for you: just now you mentioned really putting yourself out there as being a key part of what helps you get that first foot in the door; do you have any other advice that you’d give to someone who's considering a career switch? Either moving beyond academia or entering science communication?
PD: For a while in my PhD, I was flatting with a guy, a postdoc from England, who was a very good sax player. He and I set up this band, but it was kind of all friends and friends of friends and it was pretty amateur. And he told me that if I really wanted to be a musician, I needed to go and hang around with musicians. And I never really heeded that advice. But that's what I ended up doing with science communication: I went and hung around with science communicators. First thing I did was join the professional body, the Australian Science Communicators, and I volunteered at their conference. It was a real turning point for me when I walked into this conference. So I've been to lots of physics conferences before and just felt really stupid because I didn't really understand. Even years later (at a physics conference), I was sitting next to some very high-status professors at the morning tea after a lecture and they turned to each other asking what the hell that was about. And I was surprised, I asked them if they really didn’t understand it, and they told me that they don't understand half the lectures. And I couldn’t believe it, that people regularly expect to not understand the lectures! So that made me all the more passionate about science communication.
Anyway, I walked into the (science communication) conference, and it was so interesting, and I got what was going on, and I could not stop talking, talking to people and asking questions - and I've never asked a question in a physics talk before! I realised I’d found my tribe. So I guess getting to know a tribe, getting to know people, and just talking to them about what their job is. And seeing if you can volunteer for them, or do some project that gives you a sense - because you don't really know what a job is like until you do it. And actually, the truth is probably that the people you work with are as much part of a good job as the content or the field or the industry. I think try and find the people who interest you, and hang out with them, and find out what they do, and then you might find yourself naturally landing in a job that works - I hope!
JM: Really lovely to hear your story, and thank you particularly for bringing so much humor and joy! It’s always great to hear the joy in people's voice when they talk about what they do.
PD: Yeah, my final comment is you'll be amazed at what you can end up doing. That's my wrap up to everybody!
And with that, we thank Phil for sharing his story - or more accurately, many stories - with us. The places a PhD can take you!
Speaking of, if you are a PhD who has moved beyond academia and you are interested in sharing your story, please get in touch with us via our LinkedIn pages - Sam, Jonathan - we’d love to hear from you.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by persons interviewed in this series are solely that of the persons interviewed and do not reflect the views, opinions, or position of Sam, Jonathan or Sequitur Consulting.