Dr Jan Tennent: Making the leap from the lab bench to the boardroom

In this Women of Honour podcast Claire Braund talks to Dr Jan Tennent OAM - an internationally recognised researcher with specialist knowledge of antimicrobial resistance mechanisms and the discovery and commercialisation of vaccines.

Jan was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for her service to research science, and to business, and today Jan says she hopes to use the OAM “a platform for my future work to remove barriers to women and indeed to all great scientists”.

But despite being six foot tall with a head of long white blond hair, Jan says when she moved from the lab bench to the board tables of big biotech companies “it was still really hard to get noticed around the boardroom”.

As she tells Claire Braund in this podcast, her ‘love affair’ with research began last century, on the first day of the second year of her science degree at Monash University.

Now a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and the Australian Society for Microbiology and a Principal Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Jan’s specialist skills and knowledge gathering in microbiology, molecular biology, antimicrobial resistance mechanisms and vaccine development came from 18 years working as an applied research scientist at Monash during her PhD, as a post-doctoral researcher in the medical school at Umeå University, Sweden, and then as a senior research scientist and program manager at CSIRO Animal Health, Parkville.

Through subsequent executive roles at CSL, Pfizer and ConnectBio, Jan gained more than a decade of experience in the translation and commercialisation of research outcomes to products and practices for the benefit of humans and animals. Her most recent executive role was as CEO of Biomedical Victoria, the premier voice for linking medical research to clinical care in Victoria (2012-2019).

These days, she says she is proud to mentor many ‘next-gen’ researchers and is inspired to apply and share my knowledge and experience through a number of advisory panel appointments and non-executive director governance roles including with the eviDent Foundation, Apiam Animal Health (ASX:AHX), AusBiotech, and Agriculture Victoria Services.

In this podcast, Jan talks to Claire Braund about falling in love with science, living and working in Sweden - “suddenly my world opened up way beyond Footscray and the suburbs of Clayton to the other end of the world” - and what it was like working for more than a decade with CSIRO as a young female research scientist in the 80s and 90s.

She also discusses the highs and lows of working in the global bioscience space with top-flight companies including CSL and Pfizer and some of the major career challenges she has had to overcome as a leading woman in STEM.

Claire and Jan also chat about what prompted her to take on her first NED role with Tweedle Child and Family Health Service in 2011 and her subsequent move into the boardrooms of big biotech companies - and how having a science background helped around the boardtable. As she says: “In science there is no such thing as a silly question. And in fact it's exactly the same at the board table.”

Podcast Host: Claire Braund OAM, Women on Boards Executive Director and co-founder.

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