As part of a weekly showcase of future leaders and inspirational young New Zealanders from the Hyundai Pinnacle Programme, Isla Day wants to develop better connections between industry and academia in the field of drug development – and fight for climate justice | Content Partnership
Although she calls herself a “science nerd”, Isla Day is no outdated stereotype. This Wellingtonian is an extrovert, a leader in the making, and really rather enjoys a frisson of risk in the everyday. Her degree is in pharmacology, but she doesn’t imagine her future staring down the barrel of a test tube. “I think I am best placed at the intersection of what happens when the drug comes out of the lab,” she says. “I want to help develop better connections between industry and academia, to have a role in policy setting and the frameworks that incentivise drug development.”
READ MORE:
* Part one: Depth of focus
* Part two: Front of mind
* Part four: Telling jokes about the weather
At 21, she has a considered view of where her science knowledge can be most useful. Take one glance at her life experience and you understand why. She’s been immersed in a working lab; has been a founding member of a nationwide protest group; worked for government as a policy intern; and raced mountain bikes at a national level. “Doing a degree these days gives you some skills that are academic and specific to the field but also the ability to learn quickly and synthesise information,” she says. In her honours research, where she is investigating the anti-cancer and anti-viral properties of pateamine, a chemical that derives from sea sponges, she is trying to find out why it also, unhelpfully, has some immune-suppressive effects. And although her hypothesis drew a negative result, she is pragmatic. “Sometimes research creates more questions than answers. That is progress as well.”
Isla views her stint as an assistant in a nanophysics lab in a similar way. She earned the opportunity through a science communication competition and, having not studied physics since high school, felt thrown somewhat in the deep end. “I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to keep up,” she admits. Instead, she found it great fun. “We worked with biosensors that would be ruined if they got more than a couple of specs of dust in them,” she says. But she ticked it off as a career path she didn’t wish to pursue.
With a mum who studied microbiology, and an engineer dad, science was a natural direction for Isla. Her parents weren’t very political though, so she can’t point the finger at them for her next choice: becoming a founding member of School Strike 4 Climate NZ at age 18. “Some MPs were saying we were just going to sit in McDonald’s, that it was an excuse to have a day off,” she recalls. “There was vitriol on social media and in the comments section. We were just a bunch of teenagers trying to do what we could to make the most impact, out of concern for our futures. That much criticism was a lot to deal with.”
Isla, who oversaw strategy, learned to focus on her values and the kaupapa of the strike. Which is one reason she was asked by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to add her youthful voice to the technical reference group of the NZ Battery Project, a scheme that feeds into the government’s target of 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030. “An energy campaigner from Greenpeace and I are the only two environmentalists in the group and we’re the only two women. There are a lot of older, male, engineering and energy-market voices in the room. We try to provide advice and challenge their thinking because, after all, it is my generation and the one after that which is going to have to pay for their decisions.”
Underpinning her belief is that any solution should centre on climate justice, not just climate action. “Climate justice means looking at the people who are affected most by climate change. Often, they contributed the least to it. It’s about asking how we can reimagine the system to uplift everyone and take everyone on the journey.” This is a big ask, but she’s up to the task.
Isla has been fervent about protecting the environment since childhood, a value born in the forestry tracks around Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. It hardly seems possible, but mountain biking is a subject she talks about even more passionately. “I love, love, love biking,” she says. As part of charitable organisation WORD (World Off-road Riding Department), she has taken up the mantle to mentor more young girls into the sport. “Women tend to be greatly under-represented in mountain biking,” she says. “We see how it gives them more confidence and resilience in their everyday lives. That’s what makes me happy.”
While Isla can’t pinpoint exactly where her career path will lead, she knows where it won’t. She could never be a politician. “I’m more of an activist,” she says. “I am not very good at toeing party lines.”
