 I'm very excited and proud to have the fellowship but I think more important than the honour I think is the initiative itself which I think is a very very important one for women in science. To me the fellowship is extremely important because after my break with maternity leave I had to re-establish all my research so it wasn't just the time out that I had looking after my children but it was also the time that followed that trying to re-establish the work in the lab and then really get it up and running so having that fellowship allows you to come back and really focus on the research so that you can work at becoming competitive again. After having twins I found it very difficult I had to take a long period out in scientific terms it was over a year which is much longer than most people take and coming back has been quite difficult to balance demands of having three young children and trying to work the hours that most people normally do in science which includes long days and weekend work and evening work which you just can't do when you've got that many children so that creates a lot of instability because you're not competitive for external funding but having a fellowship like this available to women in my situation if you're awarded it then it provides you with two years where you can just really focus on your research and getting the results and the publications out there and so then you will be competitive again. I think it is an initiative that's needed for anyone who's had a career disruption for example you can think of a circumstance in which a young male scientist has some family difficulties or has an illness might keep him out of the workforce for a while he faces exactly the same barriers and handicaps as do women on maternity leave. This is the first of its kind in Australia but I think we'll lead the country in encouraging institutions throughout Australia to introduce a similar fellowship and I'll be disappointed if that doesn't happen because it's desperately needed. There is a real shortage of women in higher or more senior academic positions in science. At the PhD level probably 50% of the students are women but when you get to level C the that falls away to say 20% or even 15% so we're losing a lot of really talented women from science purely because of this difficulty of career disruption. The more initiatives like this the more we'll make the best use of a very valuable national resource. I hope that the fellowship will take away some of the barriers and handicaps that people particularly women face when they have career interruptions. Science is a very very competitive area research is extraordinarily competitive and so any little handicap is going to hold people back and if we can assist people by removing those handicaps then we can make the most of then their careers and their skills for the benefit of us all.