145. Interview with anthropologist, neuroscientist and board game inventor Dr Paul Mason
Shownotes
This week we were thrilled to chat with the wonderfully interdisciplinary Dr Paul Mason: anthropologist, neuroscientist, medical researcher, and inventor of a dung beetle board game. Paul cheerfully describes his own CV as looking "like a pizza with the lot" (with, somehow, even the pineapple on there). Paul is also a musician, dancer and capoeira practitioner who began his studies wanting to get into brain research, before realising he was far more interested in understanding the brain in context. That curiosity took him from laboratory internships at the Howard Florey Institute (and beyond) into a PhD in anthropology, and out into the world doing fieldwork with arts communities in Indonesia and Brazil, infectious disease patients in Vietnam and Papua New Guinea, and conservation education at Taronga Zoo.
In our wide-ranging conversation, Paul shares why he believes good science communication actually makes for good science, and how creative formats can carry serious ideas to the people who need them most. We talk about his award-winning children's book about tuberculosis (translated into thirty languages and distributed free in four countries) his dung beetle board game Hexcrement, and the surprising social magic of gathering people around a table to play. Paul also offers his best advice for researchers who want real-world impact: put in the work to ask good, well-structured questions, and always make it easy for people to help you - because kindness begets kindness, and communities of shared practice are where change begins.
You can follow Paul and learn more about his work here:
Fresh Produce Bioactives: freshproducebioactives.com.au
Insta: @freshproducebioactives and @sociocerebral
Hexcrement, via Aelytra Conservation: aelytra.com
- Paul's tuberculosis children's book: https://paul.sobriquet.net/publications/
Transcript: https://go.unimelb.edu.au/k58h