Mitra’s childhood was a little eccentric by regular standards – she was surrounded by academics. Her mother is French and her dad is Iranian and they met in Canada when they were both studying for their PhDs. Science runs in her family; Mitra’s dad is an electronics engineer with a PhD in radio frequency engineering. Her mother is a political scientist, and her aunt is a mathematician and world-renowned cryptography expert. Mitra’s mum and dad loved talking about the history of science. Her dad was obsessed with the story of mathematician Ada Lovelace – the daughter of the poet, Lord Byron. When Ada’s mother left Lord Byron, she tried to steer her daughter away from poetry and towards maths. When Ada’s friend Charles Babbage designed a mechanical general-purpose computer, Ada saw it had applications beyond just calculating. She wrote the first published algorithm that could be carried out by such a machine if it was built, and she is regarded as the first computer programmer.

As well as stories of Ada Lovelace, Mitra’s parents also told her about Florence Nightingale – not just about her nursing, but how she was the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and used research to drive change. She was an expert in collecting and analysing data and used it to show that soldiers died more often from wound infections, not their injuries as was thought at the time.

As a child, Mitra loved reading books and solving puzzles. When she was six, she was given an early computer called a Commodore 64 and her dad taught her how to code. She started inventing problems for her computer and when she solved a problem, she coded the Commodore 64 screen to fill with stars as a reward.

In her childhood, Mitra did a lot of road trips around Canada. In the car, her family played detective games where her dad took a phenomenon and asked Mitra and her sister to test it. They were simple things like: if you have soup and want to keep it warm, what would you do? Another game as they got older was finding new proofs for famous theorems like those posed by Pythagoras and Euler. When she was 8, her dad taught her to calculate the path of a projectile like how fast the ball travelled when you threw it. This was physics, but it didn’t seem like that at the time. It was just one of many games that got her to think mathematically.

Mitra grew up in a university town. In Year 7, she went to a gifted program school where it was cool to love science. The principal always said: you don’t go with the current, you are the current makers. This made a big impact on Mitra because she got the constant message that she was in charge of her learning and it was okay to rock the boat and challenge things. It also made her relish challenges and have the confidence to investigate whatever she was interested in.

Mitra’s school fostered relationships with universities which gave students the opportunity to connect with academics. Clubs at school were based around strategic thinking – chess and physics. Students weren’t forced to do what they didn’t like. She was not good at memorising things, so while subjects like biology were interesting, she couldn’t remember names of things, and because she didn’t find it joyful, she was exempted. Instead, she chose maths and physics and sports – hockey and skiing and basketball were tactical which was also good for scientific thinking. School was a fertile ground in which to flourish.

At the University of Toronto, Mitra studied Engineering Science. After that, she worked for three years in industry at places like Google to apply her engineering skills. She wanted to do a PhD and the opportunity came up to study in Australia.

Mitra’s current job is at ANSTO (Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation) which is a taxpayer funded national laboratory. Her work is in cancer research, exploring the idea of attacking cancer at a sub-cellular level with a combination of heavy charged particles (nuclei of atoms) and neutrons. This is a treatment that could be applied to ‘incurable’ cancers like some child brain cancers, and pancreatic cancer. It is really exciting research that has attracted worldwide attention.

It wasn’t until Mitra was an adult that she realised half the stories her parents told her of amazing scientists were of women, even though in the history of science, women’s work has been under-appreciated and most of the widely known stories of scientific successes were about men. Her parents addressed the imbalance in their stories. In a world where children become what they see, for the young Mitra listening to the stories of these women of science immortalised in history, she realised that could be her future too. Mitra continues these lessons with her own daughter who already wants to work at a nuclear reactor or become a physicist – and she’s only 8 years old!

Dr Mitra Safavi-Naeini is a physicist and a research leader at the ANSTO Humans Health. Her two main research areas are: particle therapy – where the nuclei of atoms are used to target cancers with poor prognosis – and using radiation to probe the internal workings of the human body through advanced medical imaging techniques. Mitra is the co-inventor of neutron capture enhanced particle therapy (NCEPT). Together with her multi-disciplinary team of chemists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians and clinicians, she has established a large group of international industry and academic partners from all around the world around the NCEPT technology and its sustainable translation.

Dr Mitra Safavi-Naeini works at ANSTO which is taxpayer-funded. She suggests coming to visit ANSTO or invite them to come to your school. There are big science ideas events at ANSTO including one on nuclear medicine. Engage with the scientists – you can even write to them. If you’re interested in ANSTO, there’s a list of tours and activities on their website.

Mitra also suggests looking around you and asking questions why and how. Figure out how things work. Look at things around you – microwave, phones – and figure out how they work. Take apart old appliances (ask first!) and see if you can put them back together.