New Year Honours: New Zealand's top scientist Dr Juliet Gerrard becomes a dame

Tuesday, 29 December 2020

One-hundred-and-fifty-four people from a variety of sectors including education, sport, health, and science have been honoured.

Asked how she feels about being made a dame, Dr Juliet Gerrard is somewhat lost for words, an unfamiliar position for the woman whose job is distilling the most up-to-date scientific information for those making the decisions that will shape our future.

Gerrard, currently Jacinda Ardern’s chief science advisor, has been named a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year Honours.

Prime Minister Jacinda Adern will take on University of Auckland Professor Juliet Gerrard as her chief science advisor. Video first published in June 2018.

While she hasn’t really processed what it means on a personal level, it hasn’t stopped her from sharing the news with her 75-year-old mum in the United Kingdom, who got a kick out of getting the good news on her birthday.

Aged 53, Gerrad has already made big contributions to her field of biochemistry in the study of proteins. Many of the discoveries that have meant the most to her she described as “super nerdy” and might not mean much to the layman – like why proteins have four sub-units rather than two.

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Chief science advisor to the prime minister, professor Juliet Gerrard, has been named a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

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In a broader sense, she is proud of the guidance she has been able to provide to young researchers rising through the ranks.

“If I look back at what I’m really glad I did in my career, [it] is looking at all the people who were in my research groups that now have their own careers and have done really well,” the Freemans Bay, Auckland resident said.

“There’s almost a sense of family pride there.”

But in the past two years since she was appointed chief science advisor her research has taken a back seat. Instead, she has been Ardern’s right-hand woman when it has come to shaping policy and discussions on science.

And science has likely never been at the forefront of the news like it has in the past year.

Since the emergence of Covid-19, Gerrard has been liaising with scientists and agencies across the world to try to bring the most up to date information to those in power in New Zealand.

Adern said Gerrard was “rightly recognised for the role she’s played putting science front and centre of our decision-making”.

But while she has pushed science forward in the lab, it hasn’t always been easy being a woman in science, Gerrard said.

She remembers having only one female lecturer when she read chemistry at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

But while she said “everyone has their war stories”, she was hopeful for the future of women in science as she saw more and more women rising to senior positions.

“It’s the old adage: ‘You can’t be what you can’t see’,” Gerrard said.

“But the more people who break through, the easier it gets for everyone else.”