Professor Andrew Gleadow
When I was a student my greatest ambition was to go to the Moon. I managed the next best thing by being fortunate
enough to work on the lunar samples returned by the Apollo astronauts in the early 1970s.
60 seconds with Andrew
Who inspires you?
Many people have inspired me - my former PhD supervisor Professor John Lovering had a major formative influence
in my early years as a scientist. In more recent years I've been inspired by some of the great historic figures of
science, and geology in particular. Studying what they actually did and how they worked shows science to be a much
more dynamic and human endeavour than the orderly, dispassionate pursuit that is usually portrayed.
What do you enjoy most about teaching?
Teaching gives me an opportunity to talk about the things that I find most exciting and to share with the students
the things that I've been able to learn - I really enjoy that. I find that enthusiasm is infectious, and I really
like the sense of being able to use that to inspire young people and motivate them to find out more about our
fascinating planet.
In three words, science is...
Exploration, excitement, and uncertainty.
To me, science is an exploration of the way things are, and of how things work. The sense of discovery that this
involves is enormously exciting. Science is often portrayed in a fairly static way as knowledge and certainty, but
in reality it is based on a high degree of uncertainty. Scientists learn to live with that and actually draw
motivation from it.
What is your biggest scientific ambition?
When I was a student my greatest ambition was to go to the Moon. I managed the next best thing by being fortunate
enough to work on the lunar samples returned by the Apollo astronauts in the early 1970s.
My other ambition at the time was to study early hominins in East Africa, which again I was enormously fortunate
to do very early in my career. I remember thinking when I was only 25, that I'd already done the two things that I had
most wanted to do - and wondering what was I going to do next. Well I'm still wondering, but something really
interesting always seems to turn up. I guess underlying it all for me is an ambition to really understand how the
Earth works and that has taken me all over the world.