Peter Pivonka's PhD was on concrete failure, earthquake engineering, and how the foundations of large bridges give way. Then a supervisor asked him what he thought about doing biomechanics in bone.

His first reaction was that it sounded strange. His second was more interesting: concrete is already well understood, and there is only so much more to be gained. Bone was wide open.

Thirty years on he is Professor and Chair of Biomechanics at Queensland University of Technology and co-director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre in Joint Biomechanics. He puts it plainly in this episode. He looks at what his old colleagues are still doing in concrete and finds it boring.

In conversation with Kenneth Cutbush, he covers the path from Vienna to Newcastle on a Schrödinger Fellowship, a planned six months of surfing that never happened because a supervisor told him to do the PhD first, and the reality of supervising twenty-five PhD candidates with wildly different skill sets.

The most valuable section is on failure. He describes the biggest defeat of his career: a major grant application that took two months of full-time work and fell just below the funding line, in the top five per cent of unfunded applications. He reapplied. The panel had changed, there was no institutional memory of the first round, and he lost again. There was no third attempt.

He is also thoughtful on PhD students who do not finish, and pushes back on the framing. A society obsessed with winners rarely allows that discovering something is not for you might simply be a thing learned rather than a failure.

For anyone weighing up a research career, the numbers give context: 155 publications, an h-index of 44, and around 9,000 citations. He is clear that at a certain point none of it means very much.

Chapters

  • 00:00 Welcome. Professor and Chair of Biomechanics at QUT
  • 01:00 A PhD on concrete failure and earthquake engineering
  • 01:57 "What would you think about doing biomechanics in bone?"
  • 03:32 Melbourne, and the world-leading bone biology institutes
  • 04:27 Vienna, and the Schrödinger Fellowship that brought him out
  • 05:18 Austria to Newcastle, and why he never went home
  • 06:04 The cultural shift
  • 06:28 The six months of surfing he never took
  • 07:49 Supervising twenty-five PhD candidates
  • 08:55 Is the human body really more interesting than concrete?
  • 09:51 The most misunderstood thing about shoulder implant fixation
  • 10:30 The ARC Training Centre, and what it produced
  • 11:31 $14.5 million invested, 699% return
  • 14:21 Watching graduates go on to fellowships of their own
  • 15:14 155 papers, an h-index of 44, and why it stops mattering
  • 16:57 The grants he did not get
  • 17:54 Two months of work, just under the funding line
  • 18:27 Reapplying to a panel with no memory of the first round
  • 21:20 What repeated setbacks build
  • 22:13 The PhD candidate who is not going to make it
  • 23:29 Advice for anyone considering a research career
  • 24:20 Leading the Australian and New Zealand Society of Biomechanics