ECR Spotlight – Coen Hird Free

Coen Hird

How did you become interested in biology?

I've been fascinated by the natural world for as long as I can remember. Every time I moved somewhere new, I would want to learn more about the local places, plants and wildlife. I have a vivid memory of my high school science teacher wheeling out a television and playing a video about DNA and cells. It totally blew my mind and stuck with me, even though at the time I was too cool for school and dropped out of biology. After high school, I eventually gave in and pursued a biology degree where my interests were nurtured and grew deeper.

Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus

I enrolled in science bridging courses due to poor grades, eventually getting me into science. I struggled through university for a few years with bad grades until finding my stride. My grades only just made me eligible for an Honours project, and I reached out to Prof. Craig Franklin and Dr Rebecca Cramp who were looking into the physiological mechanisms that allowed acid frogs to survive in naturally occurring waters with a pH in the range of stomach acid! I had seen these frogs on trips with the ecological society. They liked my ideas and took me on board to explore them – we published that work in JEB! Since then, I have done a PhD with Craig and Beck on the effects of UV and temperature on amphibian physiology. Now, I'm transitioning from my PhD to lecturing, where I am interested in the intersection between and combination of western and Indigenous knowledge systems in scientific thought and practice.

How would you explain the main findings of your paper to a member of the public?

This paper basically came about as co-authors Craig, Kate and myself realised that many of the questions we were asking about frogs and crocodiles were primarily focused on the average animal. We wondered why we didn't give the not-so-average animal the same interest! We then started realising there were a ton of interesting and relevant questions we could ask that were concerned with animals that were different to the mean. For example, we were using traditional statistical tests that showed tadpoles (on average) exposed to cold temperatures had higher levels of DNA damage when they were in UV light. But it looked like this wasn't true for the tadpoles that were receiving the highest levels of DNA damage (like those in the 80th percentile), which was quite interesting to us. What aspects of these organisms' physiology changed their response to temperature? We thought that the tendency for researchers to focus on the mean (like we did) could have come from the limited tools we have in our statistical toolbox. We found that other statistical tools existed to explore these kinds of responses such as quantile regression, which can explore the relationship between a response and variables of interest for different percentiles of the response. This tool is used a bit in economics and ecology, but not so much in experimental biology. Our article explains these ideas so that other researchers in the community might add these tools to their statistical toolbox and think about other interesting scientific questions outside of the mean, if they haven't already had these thoughts.

What do you enjoy most about research, and why?

It's been put to me that research is kind of like standing on the edge of everything you know and jumping off. There's a thrill in pushing the boundaries of your own knowledge through thinking and learning, especially when you can come into that knowledge from your own hard work. But there's also a great satisfaction in teaching, disseminating and critiquing this knowledge within a broader community that shares the same interest in and intellectual rigor for the topic. My favourite part of research has been how it has humbled me intellectually. I enjoy how research isn't black and white, much to the contrary of how I thought science worked growing up in the western education system – how the questions we ask, the methods we use and the people we work with all shape the stories we end up trying to tell as scientists.

Do you have a top tip for others just starting out at your career stage?

I think early career researchers can really benefit from intentionally engaging in scholarly works outside of their disciplines. Many of the important things I've learned as a young scientist have come from unlearning – especially that science doesn't happen in a vacuum. There's a lot of relevant and important information that exists outside of our disciplinary spheres which can help us to carve unique paths, ask unique questions and broaden our horizons. For example, myself and some other Indigenous colleagues in the environmental sciences from around the world wrote a Perspective article for JEB which spoke about the need to consider Indigenous knowledges and rights in the science we do. So much of the work we do in experimental biology is on culturally significant species, but biologists are often totally unaware of the unique Indigenous rights that might exist in their study systems. Early career researchers are perfectly positioned to build new, ethical ways of engaging in their science programmes they are building and challenging the dominant ways that we go about objectifying the natural world on Indigenous lands in a possibly extractive way. This kind of work can be scary and new, but it's important and there are lots of opportunities in this space.