Trevor Anderson

Taming the prawn

Trevor Anderson has domesticated the Murray cod and golden perch. Now he and colleagues are domesticating another native aquatic species – the white banana prawn. Anderson, general manager of the prawn farm, Crystal Bay Prawns, near Cardwell in north Queensland, manages a selective breeding program of Fenneropenaeus merguiensis that has been in place for several years.

Science is at the centre of the farm, which sells prawns around Australia and exports to New Zealand, Japan, China and Germany. Anderson and colleagues are also conducting research into prawn disease, stocking density and diet at the farm, one of the biggest in Australia.

Anderson, a biochemist, graduated from the Australian National University in 1981. His Honours project was on calcium transport in cells. He later undertook a PhD at the University of Sydney, studying the digestive system of fish.

He has moved fluidly between academe and business. He has lectured at James Cook and Deakin Universities as well as working in aquaculture, entering that industry in the 1980s before the full scale of the crisis in fisheries was recognised.

“My science was focused on comparative physiology and biochemistry, but the problem with comparative physiology is that the jobs are few and far between,” he says. “The best way to get a job was to work in aquaculture. I had experience in fish. I leveraged that experience and worked on academic topics related to aquaculture.”

His early research centred on fish nutrition and metabolism. He ranks among his best work the demonstration, with colleague Geoff Gooley, that the Murray cod could be grown in captivity. “We developed a diet to allow that to happen,” he says.

He also conducted ground-breaking research into the bizarre sex change in barramundi. In the wild, males change to females at the age of three to five years. The inversion happens at age 12 to 18 months in captive fish, however, causing problems in systems with finely tuned gender balances.

Anderson’s team discovered that plentiful food and higher water temperatures stimulated the flip, an evolutionary adaptation that maximises reproductive success in the wild. “Males put very little energy into reproduction,” he says. “If there’s more food, it’s better to be a female than a male.”

The breeding program on Fenneropenaeus merguiensis, called “Mergs” for short around the farm, has spawned big, laid back prawns.

“Wild prawns grow more slowly,” he says. “They are skittish and lose more energy. The domesticated animals are much more relaxed. If you catch a prawn in the wild, they jump around. The domesticated ones will just sit on the net or in the tray.”

It takes only four generations to domesticate the prawn, but the farm has to weigh desirable traits against genetic diversity, and brings in new blood from the wild. Anderson manages three farms, a hatchery and a sales and marketing team.

He says he likes the cut and thrust of commerce but misses supervising PhD students. “Most academics love the science. I do, too. I’ve just found another way to do it.”

Martha Cleary

From the cosmos to venture capital

When Martha Cleary was studying the universe from Mount Stromlo Observatory she had no idea she would wind up working in venture capital.

She completed her PhD at the Australian National University in 1977 with a thesis on explosions in the interstellar medium. Now, as a director of Melbourne-based Momentum Ventures Ltd, she is working to support new hi-tech companies in fields including recycling, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, deep sea drilling, instrumentation and information technology.

“Venture capital is a tough business in Australia,” she says. “It’s so much easier in other countries to get new businesses off the ground. If you want to invest in mining, there’s money to burn, but there are few willing to take on the level of risk in hi-tech start-up companies.”

She says government programs to stimulate investment in fledgling hi-tech companies have been good but piecemeal, and have lacked a long-term view.

Cleary’s first job was with ICI, where she worked in Australia and the United Kingdom on the commercialisation of technology and in new business development.

“In the 1980s, traditional markets were reaching saturation point and companies were looking for new places to invest,” she says. ICI formed new divisions in new materials, medical diagnostics, instrumentation and software development.

In the 1980s, she was the first industry representative on the Labor Government’s Commission for the Future. “I was selected because of work I had done on cycles in production in industrialised countries.”

In 1988 she took up a job in the United States with Dendrite International, a company developing customised software for the pharmaceuticals industry. She held senior management positions at Dendrite, now listed on NASDAQ.

Cleary has applied her knowledge of cosmic explosions only once since graduating. At ICI, she developed a computer model to optimise blasting operations at the Mount Newman iron ore mine in Western Australia to get the right sized rocks out. “The maths were similar,” she says.

“I’ve had an unusual career. But what I acquired from my science training was a trained mind. If you have a trained mind, you just add the database – from finance, sales, new business development, research and development, economics. If you’ve got the problem solving ability, it doesn’t matter what discipline you apply it to.”

Paul Habelko

Fuelling the future

There are few business executives to whom global warming is more relevant. Climate change is on Paul Habelko’s mind when he draws up his 20-year business plans. Habelko is Manager of Strategy and Planning at Chevron Global Gas.

“Environmental issues, including greenhouse gases, come to the forefront,” he said, speaking from the energy giant’s headquarters in San Ramon, California. “Chevron has established a whole unit on the policy side to make sure we are responsive to government, industry and shareholder concerns. On another front, we are conducting research looking at the next generation of biofuels – ones that don’t use food but cellulose – the waste product of food production.”

Habelko graduated from the Australian National University in 1981 with a BSc (Honours) in geology. He also has an MBA from Macquarie University and INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France.

His career in oil and gas began with a job as a geophysicist at Exxon. He later worked as an energy consultant for London-based Gaffney, Cline and Associates, travelling around the globe to assess projects for clients including the World Bank. He then joined Norway-based Statoil, holding senior management positions, one of which involved overseeing the company’s Russian operations.

Returning to Australia, he joined Chevron as its Commercial Manager for the North West Shelf Project in 2002 but has worked at the company’s US headquarters since 2005. He is responsible for strategic development for the group’s global Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), Gas to Liquids, shipping, power generation, pipeline and gas trading businesses world wide.

His work at the multinational, which employs almost 60,000 people and which in 2007 produced 2.62 million barrels of oil equivalent each day, comes at a time when new technology is opening up previously inaccessible oil and gas reserves. It also comes at a time of great uncertainty, but Habelko says geologists, accustomed to interpreting the deep past, are comfortable with uncertainty.

“The company’s core business is oil and gas. It will be that way for some time, but it’s not as if we will just rest on that,” he says. “We know the industry has changed and will continue to evolve, and we produce energy. The future might lie in geothermal power and alternative fuels. It’s such a large company, it will continue to hold a large slice of the energy pie but it has to adapt in line with our shareholders’ wishes.”

Although Habelko loves his job, he does sometimes yearn for fieldwork.

“Whenever geologists come in talking about prospects and flying around the globe to drill oil wells, I long for that hands-on work. In my days in the field I was really close to where it was all happening. Strategic planning tends to be a little more abstract. You wonder how close to reality you are.”

Tim Oldham

Riding the biotechnology wave

Tim Oldham could see the biotechnology boom coming as he completed his combined science/law degree at the ANU in the early 1990s. The genomics revolution was in its early stages, with the Human Genome Project under way. Scientists were unlocking the secrets of disease at the molecular level, and developing new pharmaceuticals through “rational drug design”.

With a background in both chemistry and law – a legacy adolescent indecision on career directions – Oldham was in a position to ride the biotechnology wave.

“As I got through both degrees, I started to realise the impact biotechnology was going to have,” he says. “I was thinking of doing something that helped make that happen. It was to me going to be an important thing to do.”

He is now a corporate vice-president and president, Asia-Pacific of healthcare giant Hospira, a world leader in the manufacture and supply of specialty injectable drugs and medication management systems – devices and technology for administering drugs safely and efficiently. Hospira is the largest supplier of generic injectable drugs, primarily to hospitals, with sales into more than 60 markets around the world. It is also a leading player in the emerging field of generic biopharmaceuticals.

Oldham won the ANU University Medal for chemistry in 1992 after excelling in a study program focused on physical chemistry. The following year, he won the University Medal for law. A Commonwealth Scholarship took him to the University of London in 1994, where he undertook a PhD. His thesis was on photodynamic therapy – using light activated drugs in the treatment of infections and cancer.

“An academic career was something I was never going to do,” says Oldham, who was a first grade rugby player while at the ANU. “I was more interested in the applied sciences. And by the time I’d been a student for 10 years, I didn’t feel like another few years doing an MBA.”

He took up a position in global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, describing the job as “an alternative MBA”.

In 2002, he was hired by Australian-based generic drug manufacturer Mayne Pharma, recently acquired by Hospira, starting out as the global projects manager responsible for the commercialisation of generic biopharmaceuticals. Spending four of the next five years in Europe, he was involved in a significant expansion of Mayne Pharma’s business there, including launching the then largest oncology product ever to become generic, entering Spain through acquisition, and licensing Mayne Pharma’s first generic biopharmaceuticals from Pliva in Croatia. As Chair of a committee of the European Generic Medicines Association, he was heavily involved in the creation of regulatory pathways for generic biopharmaceuticals in Europe.

In his current role within Hospira, he is guiding the company into Japanese, Chinese and Korean markets.

Oldham says his education in both chemistry and law have been central to his career.

An understanding of the technical problems in getting a new drug from the benchtop to the market – a process that can take 10 years – is critical to good corporate strategy. “The deeper the technical expertise of your executive team, the better,” he says. “My chemistry background helps me work with everyone, from our customers and marketing teams to our suppliers and R&D teams, to solve problems,” he adds. “It also means I can engage with regulatory authorities. Understanding the arguments the patent lawyers are raising has also helped.”

He says scientists, especially those with qualifications in business management, are in high demand in executive roles within the pharmaceuticals industry. “Plenty of people trained as scientists jump the fence into more commercial roles.”

Oldham is now positioning Hospira’s Asian operations for a change of emphasis from generic to proprietary drugs, currently accounting for 15 to 20 per cent of sales, and a greater use of Hospira’s US medication management systems in the region. These reduce medication errors, improve the workflow and productivity of healthcare professionals and enhance patient and caregiver safety, he says.

He predicts the biggest growth areas for jobs in biotechnology will be development of diagnostics for genetic disease, therapies for diseases of age and lifestyle (especially cancer and diabetes) and in technologies responding to the challenges of global warming, including biofuels, more efficient food production; and solar energy harvesting.