Professor Ian Fraser, the creator of the cervical cancer vaccine, was the moderator for the panel, which included Queensland-based scientists who were pushing the envelope in their fields.

Chamindie Punyadeera was born in Sri lanka and grew up in South Africa, coming to the Queensland University of Technology via the Netherlands, where she worked for tech company Phillips.

Her brother-in-law died of oral cancer in 2017, leading to her developing the idea for an oral gargle test that could detect oral and throat cancers, as well as serving as an early warning for heart disease.

“The ultimate goal is to have a test like a pregnancy test where people can test their risk of developing a certain disease,” Dr Punyadeera said.

“We’re now at the stage where we’re talking to an industry partner and they can take that technology to the next phase.”

Dr Punyadeera said her path, from the tech sector back into academia, was unusual as many STEM people go the other way, but ultimately it was about having the perseverance to see an idea come to fruition.

“Research doesn’t happen just because you have an idea. You can have lots of ideas; it’s the idea that brings to the market or the clinical space — that’s the innovation,” she said.

“It’s how do you put that lightbulb moment into practice.”

For David Lloyd, it was all about a love of cars.

Now a professor at Griffith University, Dr Lloyd said his dream job was to work at the Holden factory; however, instead he found himself working in engineering and computers.

He is now developing bionic prostheses for people who have damaged their spine, by creating “digital doubles” that can be used to manually fire the muscles in place of the signals that would have been sent by the spinal cord.

“With the digital twin, you can go from the macro right down to the micro scales and track you all the way down — physics-based modelling with artificial intelligence methods," Dr Lloyd said.

“This is after 25 years' worth of effort and bringing lots of different people together to make it work; this is a real-time computational model, a human-machine interface.”

He said that collaboration was the key to success in scientific fields, especially in today's highly specialised world.

“The vision is that we can walk into a doctor’s office and you can instantly generate a full-scale model of you which will be personalised, that will do a diagnosis, and even tell doctors how to best treat you,” he said.

“All the elements are there but we need to put it together; we’re building a space shuttle, not a tyre.”

Rounding out the panel were Neena Mitter, Director of the Centre for Horticultural Science at the University of Queensland, and Chris Jeffrey, CEO of Brisbane-based medical technology company Field Orthopaedics.

Dr Mitter works on developing non-GM non-pesticide treatments to protect crops, while Dr Jeffrey’s company has developed orthopaedic micro-screws to treat wrist fractures.

Despite the difference in their backgrounds and areas of expertise, both also agreed perseverance and collaboration were the cornerstone to developing a career in STEM fields.

Dr Fraser also highlighted the importance of perseverance, saying the Gardasil vaccine would never have been developed if he had given up early.

“We had a year when nothing worked, where you’d get up every morning and (the experiment) had failed again, and failed again,” Dr Fraser said.

“I have a vision where my two grandaughters, who are seven and nine months old, will grow up in a world where, through technology and entrepreneurship, they don’t have to worry about infectious diseases.

“It is an achievable ambition: you just have to have the passion to believe it can happen, and the willingness to work hard to get there.”