There is nothing Professor Rob Saint loves more than guiding Flinders University’s research strategies. But push him a little, and he admits to one regret.
While leading the direction of the University’s research as its Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), he’s had to let go of his own. Ask him if he misses research and his response sounds a note, almost of bereavement: “Deeply. Deeply,” he says.
Professor Saint’s career as a geneticist took him from the University of Adelaide to some of the world’s most distinguished institutions: Stanford University in California, Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, the CSIRO, Australian National University, and the University of Melbourne.
He’s been a member of the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council; is the author of the only Australian tertiary-level biology textbook; and serves on the board of the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute.
Despite joining Flinders University in 2015, he didn’t fully relinquish his own research until last year.
“I had NHMRC funding up until the end of 2017, and that was in collaboration with a colleague, Dr Stephen Gregory, whom I’ve worked with very closely for many years.”
Robert Saint is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Flinders University. He gained his undergraduate, honours and PhD degrees from the University of Adelaide, studying gene structure and expression in the earliest days of recombinant DNA technology.
This collaboration recently resulted in the launch of a sports drink, called Prep’d. “It’s a product that has come out of years of research into the effect of different gut contents on rehydration, but it's now great to see it on the market and being used, initially, by high-performing athletes.”
The University’s industry-facing Tonsley Campus was another critical factor in Professor Saint’s decision to move to Flinders, and he sees the opportunity it provides to work directly with industry as being crucial for mid-career researchers – a key focus for him.
“There’s a lot of emphasis on early career researchers and that’s justified, but I think the mid-career researchers are a bit of a neglected group,” he says. “There’s a period where researchers need more targeted support than we’ve been giving, to become one of the ‘big fish’, top-level researchers.”
And that all comes down to research leadership.
“The sort of mid-career transition where people might have PhD students, post-docs, or assistants working with them, this requires real leadership and the ability to think about a field and interpret what the most significant questions are.”
Looking to the future, Professor Saint sees his task as raising the achievements of Flinders research to a much higher level.
“All the seeds are there,” he says. “We’ve significantly changed the way people are approaching research. We are now in a position to make a substantial number of new appointments, which will strengthen existing research activities to take that next step up in demonstrating the research power that Flinders University has.”
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