When Dharmica Mistry moved to Australia, from the United Kingdom, at the age of six, she discovered an exciting new environment.

Her Indian parents weren’t university-educated and they didn’t have connections to powerful people in the world of science but they recognised their daughter’s curiosity about the world around her – and they encouraged it.

Dharmica saw herself as an explorer, in a way.

The question she could never stop asking was ‘why?’.

To her, it is still the most important question to ask about the world around her – and it’s a question that she says is an important part of any scientific journey.

She may not have had access to scientific toys as a child, growing up in Sydney, but Dharmica applied a scientific mindset to everything she touched and did.

If she broke something, she pulled it apart to understand how it worked – then put it back together again.

At that stage in her childhood, although Dharmica had no access to female role-models in the world of STEM – or even a proper understanding of what a career in STEM involved – her family raised her to believe that girls could achieve whatever what they wanted.

Growing up with her brother, this sense of equality was part of her everyday life. She played outside in the dirt with him, and he did chores inside the house with her.

If anybody outside of her own family did try to tell her that girls couldn’t do things boys could do, Dharmica would use the frustration she felt to motivate herself to prove them wrong.

Although a connection to science was becoming a part of her everyday life, Dharmica didn’t understand what scientists did, when she was a child – and because of that, she never thought about it as a career.

To her, understanding what a doctor did everyday was easier to comprehend.

She saw doctors in real life, in the community she grew up in, and that gave her a clear sense of how they helped people discover what was wrong with them – and what steps they could then take to help people improve their health.

When it came to scientists, though, Dharmica says that the idea that ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ was one reason she did not dream of being a scientist herself.

That changed in secondary school when access to different subject choices, including biology, gave her a better knowledge of how varied a life as a scientist could be.

Even studying art – and experimenting with the ways different paint colours and materials mixed together – helped her appreciate what a career in STEM could be.

Science, she realised, was about experimenting. It was also about problem-solving – and that was something Dharmica loved.

Adaptability was another thing Dharmica discovered was a big part of science.

By thinking about her own life – and how she had adapted as a young Indian girl first living in the UK and then creating a new life in Australia – Dharmica recognised her own ability to adapt and change in different environments.

STEM was also about collaboration.

Dharmica had always loved sharing ideas with other people and working together to find new ways to do things.

When she completed high school, Dharmica took her love of collaboration into a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Sydney. She graduated with an Honours in Microbiology in 2007 and then did further PhD studies in Medicine at Macquarie University.

Since then, she has won lots of awards and also come up with a discovery that has the potential to change – and save – the lives of women around the world.

Dharmica’s discovery – that there is an easier, effective way to detect breast cancer, without invasive examinations or complicated tests – was something she figured out as a young lab technician, assisting more senior scientists.

It’s a great reminder that, in science, you can start in one area and end up in another area altogether – and that a career in STEM can also be on the cutting-edge of business innovation.

For Dharmica, understanding where science fits into the everyday world is a powerful thing.

She sees herself as an impact-driven scientist and says she loves knowing that the work she does in the lab has a positive effect on people’s lives outside the lab.

From breaking toys in the backyard and working out how to put them back together again, Dharmica’s success  as a microbiologist has inspired her to encourage more girls to move into STEM – especially if they also want to change the world for the better.

Dr Dharmica Mistry is Head of Medtech at Australia’s pioneer deep-tech incubator, Cicada Innovations.

She is also the co-founder of BCAL Diagnostics, a small Australian biotechnology company developing a revolutionary blood test for the detection of breast cancer.