Jackie Leach Scully
Professor of Bioethics, Director of the Disability Innovation Institute at the University of New South Wales, and disability activist.
I’ve managed never to have worked in a university department, or a business, that has the title of anything in which I’m actually qualified. For the first few years after I did my PhD in Cellular Pathology at Newnham I followed a conventional career track in academic science, but then took a sideways move via public understanding of science, biomedical communications and science regulation into bioethics, the subject I now teach and research. But I’ve worked in departments of Physiology, Philosophy, Sociology and even Theology, and I’ve now got an MA in psychoanalytic theory which I undertook to help with my work and also because it seemed like fun!
A couple of years ago someone mentioned the word ‘retirement’ to me, and I was so horrified I ended up getting a new job in a new country on a new continent: I now work at the University of New South Wales and live in Sydney. In my time I’ve sometimes had to pay the the rent through working as a freelance translator and editor, and as a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry; I’ve had experience of living and working in England, Switzerland and Germany, and now Australia.
I also know what it’s like to build a career while living with disability, and more recently with a life-changing chronic disease. Happy to talk about any of those topics, or indeed the general topic of “your life might take you in directions you absolutely couldn’t predict”.
