Australia’s higher education sector is increasingly filled with talented and driven women: managing sprawling faculties, leading research across the span of disciplines, and taking on the job of running entire institutions. For her part, Nicola Phillips is just weeks into the top job at the newly-formed Adelaide University – a massive institution likely to soon become Australia’s largest university.The offspring of a long-deliberated merger of the University of Adelaide with the University of South Australia, Adelaide University will have a broad remit to provide high-level education for both domestic and international students and to support both applied and discovery research.
As the first vice-chancellor of Adelaide, Phillips will oversee the final meshing of the two different institutions, with two very different academic and institutional profiles.
She will oversee about 56,000 students and 11,000 staff, and take charge of ensuring the university tracks a clear path in the higher education jungle of competing interests: unions, students, academic competition, funding and government policy. She is the most recently appointed of a handful of women vice-chancellors in Australia – a highly-paid executive position overwhelmingly occupied by men, often with seven figure salaries.
“This was just the most dazzling opportunity I think I could have ever imagined for this stage of my career,” Phillips says. “It’s quite extraordinary and just unique in higher education, nationally but also internationally. It’s such an engaging undertaking and challenge and opportunity that I didn’t hesitate when I was offered the job.”
Formerly the provost of the University of Melbourne, Phillips has worked in the higher education sector for more than three decades, and she has taken the reins at Adelaide at a time of shrinking higher education budgets and shifting government policies. She knows the new university is expected to set standards and excel in research and in teaching.
“A lot of the conversation about the new university from the South Australian government has placed emphasis on the importance of having this kind of powerhouse university that’s capable of attracting people, staff and students from all over the world,” she says, adding that within weeks of its birth, Adelaide is already a notable institution.
“It’s a very distinctive academic and professional profile for the university, given the profile of the University of Adelaide and the profile of the University of South Australia coming together, and that’s something that we need to maintain,” she says.
A political economist by discipline, Phillips has always worked in academia, firstly in the UK and since 2021 in Australia. She was appointed vice-chancellor of Adelaide in mid-2025, and she was kept apprised of the decisions made about the structure of the new institution.
The university now has the breadth and the capacity to contribute to education and research across the span of disciplines, she says, and like every university it has particular fields of focus.
Apprenticeship degrees were originally devised and launched by the University of South Australia in 2024 and Phillips says work-integrated learning and partnerships with industry and business will remain a focus for the new university. “To contribute is, I think, what universities should be doing,” she says. “And I am certainly very committed to that being a distinctive part of the identity of our university.”
Phillips says the increasing number of women in university leadership positions has made a tangible difference to management in higher education. She sees a greater diversity in the styles of leadership and the mindset of the sector, and she notes women academics have made enormous strides toward outright equality.
“Early on in my career, I asked to be on a committee, and I was told that that wasn’t going to be possible because there was already a woman on it,” she says. “I think it really is striking to reflect on how much has changed, although of course there is still there’s still much work to do.”
She considers that over the last decade or so, universities have really come to grips with understanding that pregnancy and childcare interrupt women’s careers and it is no longer possible to measure an academic’s worth simply by the number and reach of the papers she has published.
“Universities are far better now at accommodating different kinds of careers, different kinds of career trajectories and accommodating the circumstances of groups of people, including women,” she says.
At the sharp end of scientific investigation, Jessica Kretzmann leads a research group at the University of Western Australia, investigating the huge potential of nano-science in the treatment of some of humanity’s most lethal diseases.
She folds DNA to create different molecular shapes to target diseased cells, and she says functional genes can be inserted into these DNA shapes, which can then be packaged and disguised to be more easily absorbed by cells – including cancer cells.
Cells have ways of defending themselves against foreign particles, so therapeutic RNA or DNA has to be wrapped up and disguised to get into them. “That’s the big problem to solve: how you actually package it to protect it, but still enable it to release where it has to release,” Kretzmann says.
On the frontier of health sciences, nanotechnology-driven gene therapies offer hope for a range of diseases. “I’m looking at how can I optimise this particle to deliver to different diseases,” she adds. “In some cases, we’re looking at neurological diseases, sometimes we’re looking at cancers.”
Every human cell contains as much as two metres of DNA, which functions according to how the base pairs on each strand in the double helix come together and how the DNA is tightly folded and ‘packed’ within the cell.
The size and shape of a DNA particle changes the function of the DNA sequence, along with changing its biological activity, Kretzmann says. Research is underway worldwide into understanding this phenomenon, and how scientists can engineer more useful and smarter particles.
“With some synthetic DNA in the lab, I can create DNA folds,” she adds. “I can design hundreds of short DNA strands to interact with a long piece of DNA; we can get it to fold in different directions, and we can actually create really complex, two- and three-dimensional shapes. We can create a cube out of DNA or a rectangle, or a molecular machine or a rotor that actually does work and moves.”
This science is not simply about treating the symptoms of disease, she adds. It’s managing the disease or the potential for disease at the molecular level and potentially eliminating genetic diseases – such as certain breast cancers – before they even begin.
Fascinated by the natural world and how it works since she was a child growing up in Karratha, Western Australia, Kretzmann finds this type of molecular research deeply satisfying. “I was always very interested in the biological side of everything,” she remembers. “But to me, chemistry kind of explains a lot of biology.”
She jumped straight from high school into a science degree at the University of Western Australia. In her third year of the course, she worked on a research project with the university’s nanotechnology research group, developing nano-particles to deliver anti-fibrotic treatment to burns injuries to help with healing and reduce scarring. “That started my real interest in research, and from there, I went into an honours degree and PhD in gene delivery,” she says.
Men still dominate in the field of science generally and particularly in chemistry, Kretzmann has found over the years. She has seen this gender division change, little by little, yet there is still an obvious imbalance in certain fields of science.
Her own research group at the University of Western Australia includes four PhD students, all women, and even though most of the students taking these types of science courses are men, most of the students who apply to do a master or doctorate degree with her are women, she says.
“I think visible leadership for women is important,” she says. “I think you’ve got to see women in these positions to show that it’s possible.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of Australia, transport researcher Haoning Xi (Alice) is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to crunch millions of smart card data (from Opal and others) to understand usage patterns of public transport.
Her focus is on transport resilience and how well and quickly transport systems recover following disruptions such as power outages, technical failures or repairs and upgrades. Unexpected transport network disruptions can leave thousands of commuters stranded, sometimes for hours, leading to knock-on effects in the home and workplace.
“I use technical tools such as predictive models and optimisation models to help transport agencies make smart decisions,” Xi says.
These decisions might include which transport corridors should be prioritised after disruptions and how to best deploy resources across different systems when disruptions occur, and how to deploy and optimise other transport modes, such as replacement buses or trams.
With a PhD in transport engineering, Xi is now a senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, and she has been awarded grants to collaborate with transport agencies, such as Newcastle Transport, to refine and optimise measures to minimise outages and accelerate recovery.
Climate change has led to increasing numbers of disaster-related transport network disruptions across Australia. A barrage of floods, bushfires, storms and other extreme weather events has disrupted often-aging transport systems and upset customers, yet increasing the use of public transport is key to reducing fossil fuel consumption and reaching Net Zero.
Xi uses historical weather data sets and social media data to assess the usability of transport systems at difficult times, and artificial intelligence to extract patterns of use and preference from the data. “This is the most challenging issue I’m focusing on,” she says, “because currently, most of the public transport systems are not reliable.”
Repeated public transport network delays deter commuters who turn to private vehicles, she adds, noting that if the efficiency and service quality of public transport is boosted commuters will again appreciate the lower cost and ease provided by travel on these networks.
“We need to optimise entire networks to guarantee the minimum service levels,” she says. “And also we need to optimise bus routes and the frequency so that we can improve the service quality but also reduce the cost. By utilising big data, we can provide better services to passengers and maximise the productivity and efficiency of the systems.”