Power move: What sparked energy expert Sarah Fairhurst's portfolio career?
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
Release Date: 02/28/2022
Dr Jan Tennent OAM: Making the leap from lab bench to the boardroom
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
Dr Jan Tennent: Making the leap from the lab bench to the boardroom In this Women of Honour podcast Claire Braund talks to Dr Jan Tennent OAM - an internationally recognised researcher with specialist knowledge of antimicrobial resistance mechanisms and the discovery and commercialisation of vaccines. Jan was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for her service to research science, and to business, and today Jan says she hopes to use the OAM “a platform for my future work to remove barriers to women and indeed to all great scientists”. But despite being six foot tall with a...
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Woman of Honour: Board recruitment specialist Bernadette Uzelac AM
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
‘If the door is closed, climb through the window’. That’s the message from board recruitment specialist and director, Bernadette Uzelac, who has been made a member of the Order of Australia (AM), for significant service to the community of the Barwon Southwest region in Victoria. Growing up in Geelong, Bernadette was married with a baby and selling Mary Kay products by the time she was 18. Three years later she had completed a commerce degree and welcomed her second child. By the 1980s, driven by a hunger to put her own stamp on something, Bernadette started her own recruitment business...
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Julie Adams OAM: Dad’s legacy brightens future for cancer patients
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
Warning: This podcast discusses suicide A curious child who grew up with an older brother, Julie Adams OAM started challenging gender stereotypes at an early age. “I felt empowered to speak up if I thought I was being treated differently because I was a girl,” said Julie. It was this curiosity, she says, that led to her success as an entrepreneur as the co-founder of Chemo@home - which offers cancer patients the convenience and flexibility of receiving treatment in the comfort of their own home - and in 2024 being awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to...
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Avril Henry AM - Levelling the playing field - Women of Honour Series
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
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Architect Helen Lochhead AO - Building a career with purpose - Women on Honour series
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
Make every day count. That’s the advice from architect and urbanist , who was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the 2024 Australia Day Honours for distinguished service to architecture and urban design, to building regulation reform, to tertiary education, and to professional organisations. A graduate of both the University of Sydney and Columbia University in New York, Helen is a woman who has certainly made every day count. A recipient of many prestigious travel scholarships and Fellowships including Fulbright, Bogliasco and the Harvard Lincoln/Loeb...
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Georgina Gubbins OAM, ‘The accidental farmer’ - Women of Honour Series
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
In this Women on Boards Honours series, WOB Executive Director talks to the 12 WOB members who were recognised in the 2024 Australia Day Honours. In this episode Claire speaks to Warrnambool cattle and sheep producer and founding member and chair of , , who was awarded an OAM for service to primary industry, and to the community. As she tells Claire “I wouldn't probably be sitting here having received this award if it hadn't been for Women on Boards!.” Georgina started her career as a nurse then moved to Victoria’s Western District in the mid-90s to help on the family farm with husband....
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Professor Ngaire Elwood AM, Beating the Odds - Women of Honour Series
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
Associate Professor Ngaire Elwood AM is driven by a strong sense of purpose that grew out of a life-changing experience that inspired her, as an inquisitive science-loving teenager, to dedicate her life to improving therapies for kids with cancer. As a teenager, she was treated for osteosarcoma, a common form of bone cancer that had a survival rate of about five per cent prior to the advent of chemotherapy. After her bone cancer diagnosis, her treatment involved an above-knee amputation, followed by 18 months of high-dose chemotherapy. Even with this ‘aggressive therapy’ the survival...
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Emerita Professor Lesley Hitchens AM - Women of Honour Series
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
In this first episode of the new Women on Boards Honours Podcast Series - featuring the 12 WOB members recognised in the 2024 Australia Day Honours - WOB co-founder and Executive Director, , chats with . Lesley was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to tertiary education, and to the law. This is only the second year that the majority of honours were awarded to women since the national system formally began on 14 February 1975 – nearly 50 years ago. Lesley had a long and distinguished legal career, starting in Sydney at Allens before she headed overseas...
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Claire Braund in conversation with Lisa Carlin - Transformational change and the importance of community
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
Growing up in South Africa Lisa Carlin experienced apartheid in its truest form. “I just felt this complete sense of unfairness of it all, and that's really carried with me today” she says. Through this she has become extremely passionate about transformation to give a voice to those who don’t have one. Lisa is the cofounder and CEO of global advisory FutureBuilders Group and author of . Her portfolio includes mentoring founders and CEOs in the HRTech, EdTech and workplace talent sector, she is on the Advisory board for Rebelliuz and Chair of the University of Cape Town...
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Optus blame game: Do we treat male and female CEOs the same?
Women on Boards - Leaders and Directors in Conversation
Is there less of a tolerance for failure for women at the top than there is for men? In the wake of former Optus CEO’s Kelly Bayer Rosmarin’s resignation from the telco following a nationwide outage that took down phone and internet services for 14 hours, Women on Boards Executive Director Claire Braund spoke with ABC Canberra Radio’s about the blame culture around CEOs following a crisis and asks, do we treat our male and female CEOs differently? Find out more about Visit our Women on Boards Follow us on
info_outlineLike Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Sarah grew up in a modest, hardworking family in a small English town before heading down the Oxbridge route and graduating from Cambridge with an MA in Natural Science. “We weren’t posh,” she tells Claire in this podcast.
Now based in Hong Kong, where she lives on a boat, Sarah pivoted to a portfolio career on governance and advisory boards in 2019 after more than 30 years working in the Australian and Asian power industries.
She now mentors startups, helping small companies overcome obstacles to growth, as well as working with larger companies and multinationals through strategic change, as they navigate the energy transition, invest in power generation, M&A, or enter Asian markets in any industry.
In this podcast, Sarah talks to Claire about living and working as an expat in Hong Kong post the 2020 crackdown imposed by Beijing, the differences between working on Asian and Australian boards, how she has navigated workplace bias in the energy sector and how she dealt with ‘imposter syndrome’. “It can be very easy to underestimate your abilities.”
A testament to seizing opportunities with both hands, and moving where life takes you, Sarah’s biggest piece of advice is “Just say yes - figure it out later.”
Find out more about what sparks Sarah Fairhurst's interests in this podcast.
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Sarah Fairhurst
Claire Braund (host)
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