Meet Australia’s version of James Bond’s Q

Dressed in sleek off-white monochrome corporate attire, chunky pearls around her neck and a slash of red lipstick, the 51-year-old is neither your stereotypical taciturn scientist nor cagey defence boffin.

She is a born communicator, both expressive and articulate, who sees her role, in part, as an interpreter between the highly specialised world of ground-breaking scientists and the rest of us.

“Part of my role is that of a translator between the work my organisation does and the public so that they understand the work we do.”

The Defence Science and Technology Group has been around in various guises for 117 years. It has 2200 staff, predominately scientists, engineers, IT specialists and technicians who work with industry and universities to develop defence and national security capabilities.

“Throughout our history, scientists have always been deployed alongside our men and women in uniform to real operations,” she says.

She points to IEDs (improvised explosive devices) – small, cheap bombs that can be detonated remotely – which became the insurgents’ weapon-of-choice across Middle East combat zones, particularly Afghanistan, from about 2003 onwards.

But DSTG engineers and scientists quickly designed a low-cost device that required minimal assembly, which could be deployed easily in hostile and arid terrain to counter IEDs.

Following their introduction there were no subsequent deaths of Australians or their allies as a result of IEDs in the Middle East.

Used to being first

It’s time to order. We both opt for the beetroot salad. Monro sticks with mineral water while I lash out with a ginger beer.

She’s been a vegetarian since the age of seven when she realised where meat came from. Her dad, an Italian and enthusiastic cook, would cut the meat into the shape of hearts and stars and try to “pull the wool over my eyes”, she says. But Monro is no one’s fool. It didn’t work.

“I just felt viscerally repulsed by the idea of consuming something that had to be killed for me to eat it,” she says.

Monro was lured away from her roles at Adelaide University as vice president and deputy vice chancellor of research in 2019. She is the first female chief Defence scientist; throughout her career she has often found herself the first female to achieve this or that, and is used to being the only woman in the room.

“I certainly feel that to be a woman who stays in science, and gets to a senior level and thrives, you’re not doing too badly,” she says.

She tells me an anecdote of being a young professor at the University of Adelaide and being sent on a leadership course. The group was balanced: 50:50 male to female; 50:50 academic and professional staff. One of the first tasks was to do a personality profile that place people in quadrants based on their strengths and weaknesses.

“The men were beautifully scattered across the four quadrants, which told me that men of many different characters and personalities could thrive in a university. But the women were all in one quadrant, which was that they were essentially stubborn, resilient and determined,” she says.

Which is Monro to the core. At the age of 12, a piano teacher told her she couldn’t be a scientist. “She may have actually played a key role in my choosing science as my career,” she laughs.

Humble beginnings

Monro comes from humble beginnings. The daughter of a painter and decorator and a TAFE teacher of secretarial studies from Bankstown in Sydney’s south-western suburbs, Monro and her brother Roger Feletto, head of finance firm Greenhill Australia, both went on to supercharged careers.

Monro won a music scholarship to Sydney Church of English Girls Grammar School, better known as SCEGGS, but it wasn’t for her instrument of choice.

“I played the piano and the cello, but they looked down and saw my enormous feet and I came out with a pipe organ scholarship,” says Monro.

“I was a very bookish and self-conscious young teen and found myself having to play this blooming great loud pipe organ at every church service. But it got me free school fees.”

It was at SCEGGS that she met the teacher who would change the direction of her life. His name was Hugh McCallum, and taught physics “imparted with a heavy Scottish lilt”.

“He helped me see that maths, which I had always found beautiful, is the language of the universe,” she says.

Unsurprisingly, she enrolled in maths and physics at the University of Sydney, where she was intent on pursuing her love for cosmology and astrophysics. Instead, she stumbled across photonics, changing the course of her life.

“What I realised – this is where personality and character come in – is that just being a passive observer of what the universe is doing is not enough for me. You can’t do experiments, you can’t create solutions. There was something missing,” she says.

Photonics, she says, is “just the science of light”. It’s actually more than that, and is a term first coined in the 1960s to describe how light was being harnessed as a telecommunications tool via lasers and optical fibres. It was the backbone of the internet.

Her PhD at the University of Sydney was nothing short of a milestone in photonics research. As Cosmos magazine described it, she “came up with a theory of how photosensitivity might be exploited”.

It described in mathematical terms how light could change the density of the glass and guide its own path of travel. Or as she put it, “write its own wave guide”.

She was just 24 years old and, after delivering her PhD findings to a scientific conference in the US, found herself with three job offers.

Her career path has been relatively simple: University of Southampton, University of Adelaide and University of South Australia, before moving to DSTG in 2019.

Along the way she authored and co-authored 500 scientific papers, leading to 21,000 citations, and has nearly 20 patents in her name.

With fellow University of Adelaide scientist David Lancaster, in 2013 she was the co-founder of Red Chip Photonics, a start-up that has pioneered the use of infrared lasers and ZBLAN waveguide chips, which are raw components for lasers.

“Through the academic system you specialise in something and become well known for that. But it has always been my flavour to get up and eat outside my box, to bring in other disciplines. I’m always learning new languages and having my assumptions questioned,” Monro says. “I’ve never been entirely happing staying within a narrow lane.”

Being chief Defence scientist, she says, is an absolute privilege.

“In this job, every week without fail, I find myself in environments where I’m learning something new about things that I never had a chance to really appreciate or understand. It’s a gift. There are few roles where you have that embedded in your everyday.”

Maths is beauty

In Ancient Greece, teaching methods combined music theory with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. The profound and enduring link between maths and music has long been debated and could come down to the simple proposition that music is a bundle of mathematical concepts.

Nevertheless, Monro is a living, breathing example of the powerful bond between the two.

“I’d always loved maths. From a very young age I saw it as patterns and beauty. I feel the same when I listen to Bach. He’s god to me. Music taps into the same neural response as maths does,” she says.

“It was about halfway through my PhD, I came to realise that I was never using my brain quite as hard as when memorising a sonata or concerto and playing difficult music. So, music, for me, develops a lot of the cognitive and personality and character elements that you need to thrive in STEM.

“It’s the ability to deal with complexity; to essentially harness a lot of the brain and to be able to respond to feedback constructively. I’m very feedback-oriented. It’s just baked in because every time you play you are subject to and seeking feedback because you want to become better, you want to be the best you can be.”

Music runs in the family. Her husband, David Monro, who she married at the age of 21, is also musical, as are her three sons, James, 21, and identical twins, Ben and Alex, 17. (She elected to take his surname partly because she thought it was easier to spell than Feletto – wrong!)

Rarely, she says, does a musician “create something of beauty in splendid isolation”. The same is true of scientists – it’s a team effort.

“I often think of my role as like a conductor of an orchestra. When it’s working really well, it’s the individuals and their work that shines, and my role is one of advocacy.

“I love science. I learn something every day. It replenishes my energy bank. It’s not my purpose to just create knowledge, even though I’m good at it, and I’ve done a lot of it. My purpose is making sure knowledge can be created and applied to make a difference.”

Her role at DSTG, she says, is to “disturb the intrinsic culture”, and she has introduced the catchphrase “make the implicit explicit”.

She wants to make it safe for the staff of one of the most secretive organisations in Australia to “challenge assumptions and consider doing things differently”.

Which means bringing the outside in, and taking the insiders out to the real world.

“The more people we have in our organisation who have lived experience of working in industry or university the better we will be. Secure, sensitive research and development, that can only be done in government, will be better if there are more people who can speak both languages,” she says.

It’s time to go. I’m heading back to the office, while Monro is off to more meetings where she will, again, play the role of ace translator of where science meets national security and where the outside world meets the top secret world of defence innovation.