Through its education and training programs, as well as onsite and offsite events, Pawsey talks and walks the D&I mantra. 

Pawsey’s commitment to D&I is driven by our executive director Mark Stickells, a prominent advocate through organisations such as CEOs for Gender Equity and reflected throughout our organisation where up to 17 different nationalities are represented. 

Among many initiatives and programs, Pawsey is a founding member of the Australasian chapter of Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) and a member of the Diversity Council of Australia. 

At the most recent International Women's Day, we had over 100 girls, women and gender-diverse students join us for a careers fair and other activities, embodying the ethos of ‘if you can see her, you can be her’. 

It is estimated that in Australia, there will be 1.2 million technology-related jobs that will need filling by 2030, as well as 20,000 space jobs, and 16,000 quantum computing jobs by the 2030s. 

Our mission at Pawsey is to champion those careers by engaging students and people from all walks of life, and to significantly contribute nationally and globally to equip scientists and researchers with the skills and training that enable them to extract maximum benefit from our world-class architecture. 

Our targets are not just students, but also teachers. Our approach leads into tertiary engagement, as witnessed by our internship program, which had over 300 students nationally apply for 35 positions during the last intake, an outstanding result. 

Our internship feedback from surveys indicate that students feel transformed, which was visible as we observed confidence levels rise significantly throughout the Internship. For example, one student moved from never having used a command line to explaining the nuances of credit card fraud and its detection through machine learning. 

Keeping the focus on life skills that generate data as a by-product develops resilience and unleashes creative thinking and problem solving. Our interns are well supported through Pawsey staff and our Intern Mentoring Program, with intern alumni returning to train and mentor the new intake. 

Another milestone is our invitation to participate in a prestigious, global HPC summer school. This year’s school was held in Atlanta, with a limit of only 80 students worldwide. Pawsey spearheaded Australia’s participation with nine graduate or postgraduate students, one keynote speaker, and two school staff or mentors. 

Mentored Sprints, an initiative pioneered in the PaCER project and now being rolled out more broadly, is an extension of this user-centric approach. 

Best thought of as a hackathon plus bespoke training, a Mentored Sprint starts with a project team determining its critical input-output bottleneck or workflow challenge. 

They then collaborate with an expert mentor toward an agreed goal, collapsing months of development time into a week of intense hackathon sprinting. 

Mentoring also extends into our work with young people.  

Pawsey delivers dozens of career outreach sessions annually and we know through experience that there is no single path to a STEM career, with many starting with simple interest and curiosity. 

We start with secondary schools, using student-driven datasets (Learn@Pawsey) and numerous other novel STEM activities, and expertly led by our diverse Pawsey staff. 

Using a topic-approach, we embed data science, AI, coding, and quantum. We practise not only core subjects, but also essential soft skills, including resilience, creative thinking, teamwork, communication, and diversity and inclusion (D&I).