“Stuff it, I’ll put my hat in the ring.”
It’s a life motto that’s served Dr Alix Woolard well and will continue to do so as she steps away from the Embrace team she helped build with Professor Helen Milroy AM to complete her Master of Clinical Psychology at Murdoch University.
With a final semester of clinical training to go before Alix embarks on an exciting new chapter, we take a look at the legacy she has left behind.
Having not stepped foot inside her Sydney university due to lockdown restrictions for close to a year and seeking a fresh start, a job opening at the then Telethon Kids Institute (now The Kids Research Institute Australia) caught Alix’s eye.
Dr Alix Woolard (in swamp green) with colleagues from The Kids' Healing Kids, Healing Families and Youth Mental Health teams.
“I knew of Helen but didn’t think I would get it,” she recalls in her final days as a senior researcher with Embrace and the Healing Kids, Healing Families team. “But I also just thought stuff it, I’ll put my hat in the ring.”
“Of course they scheduled the interview for the one day I’d planned a holiday when the COVID restrictions in NSW had lifted, and it couldn’t be rescheduled. I decided to take the interview from a tiny café at the top of Perisher – I used their Wi-Fi and did the job interview in fluoro thermals, which certainly made an impression. Everyone laughed at or with me, I’m still not sure.”
I did the interview and didn’t think too much about it – I went down the mountain, and had just started a yoga class when Helen called me. She almost tried to talk me out of it – ‘this is a big move, it’ll just be you and me, are you sure you want to move away from your family, it’s a heavy topic’.
“I moved over two weeks later.”
Now that Helen had recruited the leading candidate, she set about ensuring she stayed.
“Alix had to make the big trip from over east to resettle in Perth and it was really important to make sure she was okay here,” Helen says.
“I went into quarantine for the first two weeks of work and had people I’d never met dropping off care packages – so it was a really lovely first impression,” Alix adds.
A team of two now in place, they set about applying for grants, quickly succeeding in winning three of them.
“We were busy very quickly,” Alix says. “I think it goes to show how needed and innovative the work was that we were pitching.”
The pair found they shared similar sentiments about what research the community most needed, and how to go about research differently – improving cultural sensitivity and building creativity into projects became important touchstones.
“It was easy for us to dream big together,” Helen recalls. “We bounced ideas off each other, particularly in regard to making sure research was relevant, accessible. And so translation grew out of wanting to make sure what we were doing didn’t just appear in articles but was translated out into the community.”
Out of multiple successful grants, the team exploded from two to 15 staff within 18 months.
“Alix was an absolute people magnet,” Helen says. “She attracted researchers from all over The Kids and elsewhere and the team started to build with likeminded people. It became easy to keep a culture of respect and kindness and support out of that.”
“What I’m most proud of,” Alix adds, “is that I think I collect relationships with people and they often want to come back and work for us. Many people in the team started as students or volunteers and because Helen and I value empathy and compassion, that became a core value in the team and so it was an attractive team to work for.”
With the ultimate goal of having a foot in both clinical work and research (“Every researcher I know who is also a clinician is a better researcher, and vice versa,” Alix explains), for the pair, who have assembled a team of over 20 researchers, it’s a matter of when, not if, they work together again.
“Alix was such a wonderfully energetic, enthusiastic and innovative personality,” Helen says.
“Having that combination in such a young person was a wonderful opportunity for me to feel inspired in the work going forward – I think we inspired each other.”
Dr Alix Woolard and Professor Helen Milroy at PCH in 2023.