Lia McLellan – Year 5

Suzanna Garbuz – Year 5

We had the honour of welcoming Vanessa Pirotta to Emanuel School on Wednesday. She talked to the Imaginarium After Hours Club about her career in the field of marine biology, where she mainly focuses on whales. 

Vanessa was born on a farm near Canberra and had a cow as a pet. She lived three hours from the nearest coastline but has always loved whales and been interested in their features and personalities. Today her job and life is mainly based near water, it is amazing that she kept her passion all the way through her life. She is so happy that her job involves her favourite animal, a whale. At school she loved Science and Maths and in High School her favourite subjects were Chemistry and Biology.

After completing her Masters and PhD, she wanted to create a device to collect whale snot so that scientists could further investigate whales. She teamed up with a drone engineer to create a drone that goes up close to a whale and waits for it to spout. Once it had spouted the drone would fly as close as 1 metre away from the whale, right through the spout and collect the whale snot on a petrie dish. Her day consists of being out on the ocean, collecting the whale snot with her drone and then going into her lab and using a special machine to seperate the bacteria and viruses from the whale snot. In the process, Vanessa has discovered 6 new viruses inside whales by using her drone.

As well as all of that, Vanessa talked to us about the different skills needed to become a scientist. The first skill was teamwork. She said this was relevant to her life because she wanted to build a drone but had no idea whatsoever on how to do it. So she teamed up with an expert drone engineer to create a drone that has helped scientists around the world make many new discoveries on whales. That is the result of excellent teamwork!

The second skill she talked to us about was consideration. Vanessa said that consideration helped her in STEAM because she needed to consider all possible outcomes of her experiments. As well as that, consideration is an important attribute in her life because she needs to listen to all perspectives and ideas around her field of expertise – by doing this she gains lots of new information and ideas. 

The final skill she told us about was patience. According to Vanessa this is vital because some results for the experiments she conducts take a long time to be revealed. In general, patience is an important and useful skill and in STEAM even more so.                                 

Vanessa’s story was really interesting, we all were involved and we were captivated by her communication skills and stories. She told us what it’s like to be a scientist, and her path to now. She also told us what she had accomplished and how it wasn’t always easy – that you need to put in effort and show determination. She told us about the skills we needed as a scientist to succeed. We were really engaged the whole time and we asked some really good questions. Overall it was a pleasure to meet Vanessa Pirrota and we learnt a lot. We are excited to welcome Vanessa back to Emanuel School on 11 September 2019 for the Innovation Festival panel.