11. Prof Leigh Johnston

Welcome back to Mingle with Muse. Today I'm joined by Leigh Johnson. Leigh is head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Director of the Melbourne Brain Centre Imaging Unit in the Department of Radiology. Leigh studied electrical engineering and computer science as an undergraduate and in a PhD in statistical single processing. After a few years wondering around in the research goodness, Leigh fell into the world of neuroscience and brain imaging and hasn't looked back. I'm looking forward to having a chat with Leigh today. Without further ado, let's Mingle. [Music] Oh, thank you. Welcome. We're really excited you're going. Thanks Francis. I'm going really well on this wet Friday afternoon. [Music] I think it's fitting that I finally get to sit down and have a chat with the head of the department of the course that I'm studying with one week to go of academic classes when I hold a grade. I remember first sort of interacting with you. I think it was in a Zoom meeting about the course and I think you were just recently appointed on the head of the department then I think that was in 2020. So I've been doing this for two years, 2021. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's that whole experience been like for you as a head of department? What are you actually doing? That's a very good question I described as middle management. So it's really great as head of department I get to essentially be the cheerleader for the staff in the department for the students in the department. So it's a lot of people and situation management. It's not too much on the finite side of things. It kind of happened slightly higher up the food chain. But it is about trying to positively influence the direction that the department is going and certainly the student experience, which we use that phrase a lot. But coming out of COVID we're still working out how to teach in new ways to engage with a student cohort who isn't the same student cohort that went into COVID. I mean that not just in terms of the physical people who have obviously passed on but also the past that some died. Francis you're not going to invite me back. But obviously moved on to their careers. But just in terms of students attitudes to being in lectures and. What have you noticed over those years of students and interactions? So across the board everybody is noticing that students are not turning up to lectures as much. And I think that that's. That can be a bit disheartening as a lecturer but it's not just students bored and doesn't want to come. There's lots of different pressures on students these days. I think as rent becomes more expensive in Melbourne it's just an expensive place to live. More and more students are working and that's a fact of life. And so people don't you know they do make that very pragmatic decision. I've got to come in for a lecture or I know I have to be at work in three hours. I'm not going to so we're aware that that's certainly some of it. But also I think that people got used to online environments and so like lectures I can look at them afterwards and I can take notes and I can pause. And I'll get my learning there but then I'll just turn up to workshops and tutorials. The problem is from my side of things that the lecturers are the ones with the real expertise and they subject. And you want a lecture to be engaging like I like to know all the students in my classes names so that we can actually have a proper conversation through the lecture. And if you've only got three people in the class. It's been hard to do it that way. And I genuinely think that students get more out of coming to a lecture than they do just listening and absorbing information. So that's definitely what we've noticed the most is just the attendance and willingness to engage with academics. And have you been able to sort of brainstorm by using which you could get students back to be there? That's a great question. It's tricky because there's one kind of philosophy that would say well you can make students turn up to lectures by making something accessible. But of course our other issue is that the time-tapling system does not mean that you just cannot set up a time table that means students don't have classes. So any idea of getting students to attend lectures is therefore dead in the water if we can't ensure that everybody has a clash free time table. And I don't like that anyway because you want students to turn up because they want to not because they're being forced to or assist. So the kind of ideas that we're tossing around are very much more on the have some lectures that are in that style where you can just listen to it and absorb the information and have the lecturers have more consultation sessions. So the traditional lecture turns into a back and forth discussion. And there are some subjects that are starting to do that more and I think it's paying dividends for them. Yeah. I'm going to be honest. I think I'll forward into the trap of watching lectures online since COVID as well. I recall back in first year where I was actively going in three, four days a week containing all my lectures and then, yeah since COVID I think I've haven't done that as much. But with your subject that you teach me imaging that was taught very well by yourself and Catherine. But you managed to interact with the students by having like tutorials within the lectures. That's like that's when I started coming in and you know doing questions in class with the lecture is actually quite engaging. So which is meant to be but still if it's only maximum of 10% of the students coming. Still not reaching the vast majority, which we kind of see at the other end of semester where students have a if you've never wrestled with a problem if you haven't really had to think about something then you're a question whether you actually really understand it. And we've certainly talked about that and of course it's a matter of scale so in biomedical engineering I think we have advantages because our class sizes are relatively small. But you start talking about lectures going out to workshops and meeting the students where they are actually coming in and it becomes a workload issue. Hundreds of students spread across five different workshops and. It's tricky to work out how to make how to manage that how to resource it. But somehow we have to get back to that model of the you know the lecture student interaction more. So if you have any ideas maybe just get me on my lecture. The lecture I see that that's where we're trapped by our time table. Yes, we would dearly love to turn off lecture captions tell you the truth but like I'm medical imaging last semester. Three lectures every lecture clashed with another. Yeah, biomedical engineering subject and there weren't many students affected but still we didn't manage to get that right now time table and that was a bit of a slip up with that there were a few staff changes going on and people were overloaded there were reasons for it. So hopefully moving forward will be able to do it a bit better but you know somebody will be taking. Japanese or some random non biomedical engineering subject and there's always going to be classic so we will keep lecture on you heard it here first we're not about to turn off lecture capture promise. Lovely. According to your profile on you develop find an expert page your interest the center around improving acquisition sequences and analysis methods for high field MRI and the application of various other medical imaging devices to better understand of brand diseases and disorders. So now you're obviously the director of the Melbourne brand center in the unit in the department of biology but yeah you've obviously got a lot of experience in the neuroscience field which you might touch on a bit but I just want to know where your passion for for neuroscience and medical. That's a very good question so I was. 31 before I discovered anything to do with biology biomedical anything I was one of those annoying people that thought that there was real engineering in science which was physics chemistry to a certain extent but largely physics and maths and electrical engineering mechanical engineering. And I had no interest in it I tell people this very openly I really was I had great marks I did really well in my subjects I got a PhD because I told myself I was always going to get a PhD and was miserable just didn't really enjoy what I was doing. And we can got this close I'm holding up my fingers very very close together to when rolling in a JD to go and become a patent attorney that was after a PhD so I was in my late 20s at the time and some academics here and and places I've been over broad that I've been working abroad. Just encouraged me maybe just haven't found what you really interested in and I heard of like I attended a two day workshop on brain dynamic. So the kind of exactly the kind of stuff that you learn in your lymphomaism processing. But for me, I had never come across this before and the idea that differential equations actually described how the brain worked completely blew my mind. I mean, I feel very ignorant saying that now, because I had really stayed away from anything biological. And the idea that the Hodgkin Huxley I've got that right. Yes. Hodgkin Huxley, people that won the Nobel Prize for doing experiments on a squid axon and then modeling it, it was just amazing to me that that's and it got me thinking about neuroscience. And so I was moving back to Australia. And just there was an opportunity, you know, and an opportunity to work at the flurry and be the link between engineering and neuroscience at the, you know, the post-oclabel that I was at then. And I thought that sounds great. That's brain. We'll see where it goes. And I had been working in computer vision. So I was still trying to find my way around electrical engineering type research. And I thought, oh, computer vision might exciting, but I didn't find it that exciting. It was very routine. It was mathematics and mathematics is great. But if for me, if it didn't have a purpose, it wasn't that interesting. And so the imaging team found out that I was coming on board at the flurry and said, how about you come and sit with us and chat. And I then came across MRI. And honestly, it was one of those things that was like, hang on, how does this thing work? And it was me discovering my inner engineer. I thought I thought I was a terrible engineer and I was to tell you the truth because I had no interest in it. But it was, since then, and so that's been, you know, many years now. But it's a technology that involves its quantum physics at its heart. But there's a lot of physics, a lot of engineering, a lot of software, physiology. You put all of those things together and every single day, like just before I came here, like I learned things that I didn't know before. And there aren't too many jobs. Well, there aren't too many technologies, I think that you can for 15, 20 years, learn about it and still learn fundamentally new things that you didn't understand every day. So it is that all encompassing. So for me, it's just, it's the holy grail of research to find something that you're so kind of enamored with. Like it bogals my brain that this technology actually works. And we take three dimensional images of the insides of objects, human bodies. It's awesome. So as you can tell, I'm pretty enthusiastic about it. But yet that's how I fell into it. I was not young and really, really didn't know what I was doing with my life in terms of a career. And I mean, that's why I tell students, don't worry if you don't work at this point. Not everybody, not everybody comes into university knowing exactly who they want to be. And I had this pie in the sky idea that I was going to be an academic. But tend to actually have to like me. It seems to me, I'm trying to find an answer that doesn't just sound glib. Like it is about explaining something to students so that it makes sense to get that kind of aha moment of, oh, I thought that was difficult, but it isn't if you break it down. But that's the truth of it. That's why I love teaching because at the end of the day, rocket science isn't rocket science. It just needs to be broken down into enough understandable steps to understand what's going on. And that is the work of a good teacher. Right. I don't know how many times I've tried to understand quantum computing. And I don't. I don't understand how experimentally our quantum computer works. So if somebody's listening to this podcast and would like to teach it to me, that would be awesome. But at some point, I know I'm going to come across somebody's probably some online lecture that's going to actually explain it in a way to me that makes sense. And I'm going to have that aha moment. And it's going to be, oh, now I understand, right? That's it. This is the point of this technology. And that's the kind of moment that I know I'm going to have with that. But I like to have that with students all the time, not because it makes me feel good because that means that the students are actually learning something. I think particularly biomedical engineering, now I'm going to generalize. And I'm going to assume that most biomedical most people listening to your podcast are biomedical engineering people. A lot of electrical engineers, which is my background, the students come into electrical engineering having known since they were five that they were going to be some form of mechatronics electrical mechanical time. I love programming. And biomedical engineering seems to be full of more, let's say, well, rounded students who have a broader interest than just something very techy. But what that brings with it, I think, tends to be, and again, I'm generalising here, but students that just need a little bit more, you are intelligent people. You don't have to have known how to do this. You don't have to have done this since you were 10 years old to be good at it. As an adult, that's the job of a lecturer. And so that's what I want to get people up to a really technically proficient level in whatever they're studying. And of course, you know, my specialty is more on the signal processing circuits side of things. But to demystify those concepts so that people go from this kind of, oh, I'm so afraid of this topic because it's difficult to that, oh, that's not so bad after all. Oh, actually, I really enjoy that I can do that as a career. So I hope that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're right. With that assumption, like I didn't know I wanted to do biomedical engineering until perhaps third year of my uni even going into the masters, I still did unsure, but the curriculum's worked out such that I've had exposure to every corner of biomedical engineering because it's so broad. And I'm pretty grateful for that. So good. Yeah, good. Yeah, yeah. Touching back on your postdoc research, when I was a bit to Canada, and your uni, and I did French. So I'm going to have crack at this university catalytic there in Belgium. Delivered? Yeah. Yeah. What was that experience like for you, like making the machine, it's a pretty big move overseas and big learning herbs out of that whole trip? So I went from, so actually I did my undergraduate at Melbourne uni and I finished my engineering degree at Melbourne and I did my fifth year, which was a science degree at the time. I went on exchange to Canada. So that was my first experience with living overseas as an adult. And then I came back and did a PhD and then I went to Belgium. And that was, I think everybody needs to live somewhere where they don't speak the language properly to really get some empathy for people in that situation. I felt like I'd lost my sense of humour because while we worked, you know, everyone spoke English. In the tea room people were speaking French at a rate of knots that my year 10 French did not and so you know, there's jokes and you know, the person sitting there without smiling or if you're smiling, you just feel like you're being a bit of an idiot. So that was really good experience for me because it's one thing to, you know, kind of know these things theoretically but to experience it personally. And I would like to think that I am empathetic towards people who don't speak English as fluently as the rest of us. And it's not a fun experience. And so I tried to get better French while I was there and I did but one year isn't, I guess it's enough for people who have a real giftful languages that probably isn't my head saips. Did that language barrier impact your ability to like work with colleagues? No, that was very, very good about, well, I say good. Is it good that everybody just reverts to English? I'm not sure. They were very understanding and nobody made me feel bad about that in any sense. So no, that was fine. But again, it was me struggling with what I, it was great. So I mean, I got, I got to be in this amazing institute there and learn a lot. But again, I wasn't really interested in what it was doing. And I went to Canada there after that actually for personal reasons. And so when I've been in Canada the first time I met my, well, she's my wife and has been for many, many years. But we met when we were 22 and she followed me to Australia and then when I went to Belgium, she went back to Canada and so I went over to Canada and it turns out you wouldn't believe it. But choosing a job based on just being in the right city probably isn't a great way to choose a job. So yeah, I went, it was great. I went to York University to a centre for vision research and I did four years in computer vision. It worked out well because we, you know, we wanted to live in Toronto at the time. But again, that career satisfaction wasn't there for me. So great life experience. Yeah, and things went really well when I was playing a lot of ultimate frisbee. It was just it was really, really good times. But it took coming back to Melbourne to actually start the career probably. That's right. Because I mean, career is what we do when we're not you know, it's life. Life's more important than your career. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. We've got to find a balance somewhere. Exactly. Exactly. What are you doing at the Melbourne Brain? The NBCIU. So we have a, anyone who's taking medical imaging, it's going to roll their eyes. So we have, yeah, this again, leg and with the MRI stuff, we have an ultra high field MRI system. So it's a human system, which is seven Tesla or you clinical scanners are three Tesla and so it means it's an extra big magnetic field. It just means we can take nicer images, but it comes with a host of technological problems. And so we have, we, we are a platform technology at the university. So anyone that has a project that they want to do, they want to do some kind of functional brain scans, we work a lot with psychology, with a psychiatry where they set up research studies and they come and use our scanners. Well, we helped with this scanning. So we have radiographers that are involved in that. So we have a wide range of radiographers, neuroscience, physicists, engineers, all working to try to make this technology work better. To, I don't kid myself, I'm not going to solve a brain disease. I'm not going to suddenly work out why Parkinson's is Parkinson's. Parkinson's, right? But it's chipping away at it. And from my point of view, it's making the sequences work better. And the analysis that we do of the images that come off at better in order to help the neuroscience and then your oligis that research. It's really, really fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very fun. Sorry. Are you allowed to say what you're researching at the moment? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, okay. I'm just thinking of what I did today. So, this is going to get technical Francis. We design, so there's something called parallel transmit. So rather than, again, there's there's a big static magnetic field that you lie in when you're in an MRI and then you have to apply a series of other magnetic fields on and off to change, to tip the magnetization off equilibrium. And then we listen to it as it's returning to equilibrium. So, a modern system is something called parallel transmit, which means rather than just being out the control one excitation field, we get to control eight of them. And that's an electrical engineering signal processing problem about what currents do you put through which coils when to make the most uniform excitation across the brain. So, literally, that's, you know, the meeting I had directly before this was about that PhD students project and he's using machine learning approaches and mathematical optimization to design better pulses that work better on PTX systems, these parallel transmit systems, which are a seven Tesla specialty, like I feel like. And there aren't too many groups around the world that really know how to do PTX design properly. And we're playing in that space. So, it's good fun. Yeah, that's interesting. You obviously say in a lot of students in the biomedical engineering field kind of graduate as we discussed before. I guess as, well personally, as my cohort enters the final sort of chapters of our masters degree, you know, assuming we do pieced out subjects and all that, do you have any, I guess, life advice for those who are graduating and maybe a bit fearful of what the future holds to them, like USA and before that it took you some time to figure out, you know, what you were interested in perhaps there's no rushing finding that out. But, yeah. I say, I almost feel it is such a position of privilege, of course, for me to say, oh, I really didn't like what I was doing. And you know, don't stop until you find what it is, but realistically anyone that is able to attend a university like Melbourne or any of the other good universities in Australia around the world are already in the privileged part of the population, right? And therefore, I think it's our expectation that we end up with careers that really suit our personalities and that really give us a reason to get up and go to work each day. And so it is about that not settling, but not just about not settling, but things that you're good at, right? And I was never going to be good at sitting in a road by myself and just working me in a computer, I really, really love talking to people. And having meetings, some people hate me, so I love going to meetings. That's why I'm going to farm with them. But you know, you graduate and you go, what do I do? And opportunities arise and maybe regret some, but at the end of the day, you know, oh, should I have taken that job? I should have taken this job. Or I couldn't find a job at all. So I just started doing XYZ right. The students that I talked to, you know, three years, five years, ten years down the track, kind of find that meandering past towards what it is that actually really suits them. And it doesn't come that quickly for some people. I think other, you know, some people are just kind of destined to jump very quickly into something that they love for the rest of their life. But nowadays, I mean, people don't tend to work in the one position. It's there's much more changing every couple of years. So I don't, I don't know, have any great advice. Well, what I do notice is, you know, students are so worried about getting the best marks into subjects and being horrified if they're not. You know, I spent so much time on that why I didn't I get 90% to recover. At the end of the day, the marks that you get are nowhere near as important in your career as your experience and communication skills. And if you're somebody with good communication skills, employers will want you irrespective of whether and actually sometimes they really like the fact that you had a hard time with engineering maths in second year and it if you failed it and it's like, oh yeah, so did I. Or it's just that resilience to get through, right? Because it's all good skills. But it's so that's what I would say is just try not to be too worried about it. And again, I say that knowing what I'm not trying to make light of, oh, don't be worried, or all work out because it's a stressful time and finding a job and being able to afford to live in a particular place or whatever that's any stressful times. But I do believe that things on the whole do work out for the best. Sounds very waffly for me to say it like they're sure probably. Well, superficially, feel yourself. I think it's possible to incorporate those life sort of skills more into academics and so keep your communication skills as a big one. And there is opportunity for students to develop that through working in group projects and things like that. But in terms of like experience in the field is very important. I feel like more than not often than not, it's on the student to find that experience through means such as the internship subject, for example, at the department office or many other resources out there. Do you think there's no opportunity for that to be more incorporated into the course? So the internships are offered on a faculty level rather than just being departmental. We're certainly very aware like I love the idea of everyone doing work experience, paid work experience, not you know, voluntary or okay. Yeah, I'm paid, but the problem then is that if you mandated in a subject or in a course, then you have to ensure that everybody's going to have access to that. And we have, you know, a situation where some students would struggle. So we're certainly interested in finding more ways to facilitate those, not they can be informal internships as well. And that's part of our industry advisory group that we work with who do, I think, do a pretty good job of finding some some experience of so our students outside the norm or outside just the standard internships. It'd be great if our capstone projects were had a higher number of industry projects. So it would be great if our capstone projects had more industry engagement. But often, and I'm a bit mystified about this, but we'll put forward a list of capstone projects which involve a whole bunch of industry ones and they not necessarily first choice. from the students. Students will pick, oh, well, that's the lecturer that I want to have supervised. And maybe that's out of a fear of the unknown or whatever. But I think that there's work that we can do in actually preparing or setting expectations or just talking with students more ahead of the time that they're making that decision about the capstone project. So do you realise this isn't an opportunity that you could get off campus and into a real life? So certainly, internships, capstone projects, other just experiences we're running this summer research experience program through the department where we, because students kind of go, oh, should I go on and do a PhD? Well, I come and work in the lab for a few months and see what it's like. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting point you made about, interesting point you made about how the industry associated capstone projects were not first pits because when I was looking at the capstone project, I was looking at the industry ones and I was thinking, oh, perhaps if I work with this company, then there might be an opportunity for me in the future. And quite often, I think, quite often the companies are looking for people. And if they find somebody good through a capstone, then they will certainly take them on. But because we provide such a broad list, what we've had this kind of embarrassing situation arise where industry partners will put up projects that aren't chosen. And we have to go back to them and say, oh, thank you for the work that you did to get that ready, but we don't have any students to give you. So I think there must be a better way that we can do it. And again, hopefully because we don't have a large cohort compared to civil engineering or something. We should be as academic staff talking to students more. What is it that you guys actually want? Why aren't you choosing these projects? How can we get you involved? You know, so that's, you know, that's something that I've certainly got in my mind to focus on more from our side of things is actually improving the engagement and the level of dialogue that we have with students so that we, so that we can, I was going to say, get the outcomes along, but it's not about the outcomes. We wanted genuinely improving the employability of the students. We have no excuse not to be talking to students more. Really? I was horrified to find out recently that most people in the, the reps that came to the student's staff liaison committee, I just asked them, do your demonstrators and tutors know your names? And pretty much nobody thought that the tutors knew their names. That's not okay, right? There has to be a point at which we get to know as to student cohort and, and can then on a more personal level, interact, give advice, put them in contact with people you know that's all possible. Exactly. Give the students a sense of belonging, you might actually want to come to campus. That's right. Outside of academia and research, what do you like to go up to in your spare time? Oh Jay Francis. No, well that's the problem I don't and I, well I have two 14-year-old daughters and so faring them from basketball practice to music lessons to all the rest of it that does take up a fair amount of time, I mean, so yeah, I do a lot of work and a lot of time with my family and unfortunately that kind of took over hobbies. It's a terrible thing to get old and unfit I've got to say. Yes, it was a really bad thing. If it was up to me, the whole world would be playing ultimate frisbee, but that's a huge, I just, yeah, but I haven't played it for years because I've just had a knee replacement. It's been years and years of being terribly unable to walk a little on-run. It has the knee holding up now. It's awesome. It's like no pain, so yeah. Thanks very much, Leigh, for coming onto the podcast today. We've been warned about five times going through every but, so for those who don't know, Leigh teaches the medical imaging subject as part of the Masters of Biomedical Engineering course and it's probably one of the most interesting subjects that I've completed. It was difficult, but I learned a lot. If you do do it, then you get to save Leigh's awesome assortment of things that she uses and the amazing diagrams she draws. As well as Catherine as well. That subject runs in semester one of each year. If you think about doing that next year and after listening to this podcast, then hopefully you won too. Thanks so much, Leigh, for coming onto the podcast today. Absolutely delighted to join your Francis. It's just been amusing with all of the, we are literally about to be kicked out there. Thanks, Leigh. Thank you, Leigh. Thanks, Francis. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Mingle with Meabes podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a like, a follow, a share, a review, or all of the above. Get into contact with Meabes or myself via the addresses in the show notes to leave any questions, feedback, suggested guests, or to get yourself on the podcast. Until next time, take care.