Sharon Lewin’s parents were Jewish war refugees. They fled Europe to escape the horrible persecution in World War II. Even though Sharon’s parents came from educated families of doctors and historians and engineers, they missed out on the chance to continue their education because of the war. When they arrived in Australia as refugees, the one thing they wanted for their children above all else was education.

When you arrive in a country as a refugee, you have to build your life often from nothing, and the way to build from nothing means a lot of hard work. So the lesson Sharon learnt early on was that if you work hard, you can achieve anything. Sharon was a hard worker from the minute she started school. Lucky, she loved learning and was curious about everything. Her mum wanted her to have a really well-rounded life – lots of sport, piano, lots of friends – as well as the all-important education.

In primary school, Sharon didn’t particularly love science or maths, but once she hit secondary school, the passion began. With some great teachers, she learnt to love the precision and logic of maths and physics and chemistry. She went to a co-ed secondary school and hardly noticed she was often the only girl in a class of boys doing advanced maths or subjects that didn’t seem to attract girls. She had continued to play the piano and for one assignment in Year 12, she combined her love of music and her love of physics and researched the physics behind how sound is created in the piano.

As she got to the end of secondary school, Sharon had a big choice to make. She wanted to be an engineer. Or maybe an astronaut. But her parents felt that medicine would be a good career for their daughter. It would allow her to travel, to work anywhere in the world, and to help people. It was a hard decision, so to give herself time to make up her mind, Sharon took a gap year and travelled. By the time her gap year was over, she chose medicine.

Sharon agreed with her parents. Medicine was a great career and not only that, it offered lots of opportunities to work anywhere in the world. It also tapped into her love of biology and the human body as well as her love of research.

After Sharon finished her studies, she travelled to Kenya in 1989 and spent the year working there just as the HIV outbreak hit. She realised that while she could work on the frontline, caring for patients, what was really needed was doctors doing research to try and find a treatment and a cure.

After Kenya, Sharon did a physician exam then worked for a few years in infectious diseases. In 1992, in her first year of infectious diseases training, a young man came into the hospital desperately unwell with HIV Aids. Most people with the disease had about ten years of relatively good health before they start to deteriorate. This young man didn’t. In those days, there was a lot of stigma around the diagnosis, and he died within days, alone. He had kept his disease a secret from his family. Sharon saw the incredible loneliness in the 22-year-old man dying, shamed, and with such rapid disease progression. She knew that science needed to discover why some people died so quickly and some didn’t. In those early years, there was no real treatment.

We have to do something about this, Sharon thought. And perhaps that was the moment she devoted her career to doing something about it. She finished her infectious diseases training and did a PhD in virology as a clinician scientist to understand the big questions. She trained in New York and emersed herself in seven years of research. When she returned to Melbourne, Sharon headed up infectious diseases at the Alfred. She wanted a department which could combine medicine and research, and inspire younger doctors to pursue research. The solutions to the big problems lay with the doctors working behind the scenes, trying to find answers.

Sharon was always interested in finding a cure for HIV Aids. Forty years after the emergence of HIV, people with the disease can now be treated with one tablet a day and they can live a good life. The work Sharon and her colleagues have done has made a huge difference.

One of the silver linings scientists like Sharon realised when COVID struck the world, was that suddenly, there was a huge global increase in the money spent on research into vaccines. This means that all fields might benefit from the research and attention on viruses during this time.

Professor Sharon Lewin is Director of the Doherty Institute and a Professor of Medicine at The University of Melbourne. She is a National Health and Medical Research Council Practitioner Fellow. As an infectious diseases physician, her laboratory focuses on clinical research aimed at finding a cure for HIV.

Professor Sharon Lewin’s advice to young people wanting an experience in her field is to use scientific thinking – hypothesis, methodology, results, conclusion – in everyday activities.

You have an idea, you test it, you gather results, and you use the results to come to a conclusion. She says scientific thinking is absolutely relevant in the thinking process and helps us solve problems. If you use this method, it will also make you become a scientific thinker.

‘It’s a thought process of having an idea and proving whether it’s right or wrong,’ she says.