Dr Emily Finch
Beamline Scientist - ANSTO (Australian Synchrotron)
Bachelor of Science (Honours, Geoscience) & PhD (Geoscience)
November 2021
Dr Emily Finch is a Beamline Scientist at ANSTO’s Australian Synchrotron. The Synchrotron is an electron particle accelerator. A beamline is machinery coming off the accelerator which tunes, focuses, and shapes the x-rays produced by the accelerator into a beam that we can shoot at samples.
Right now Emily and her team are building a beamline, and it’s due to come online for use in September 2022. Once it’s running, Emily’s role will be training scientists from all over the world to use the beamline for their research. It can help solve mysteries across all disciplines! For example, the beamline can be used to identify toxins in soil, decipher the chemistry of pigments in ancient artworks, and help us uncover how new drugs will react with the body.
Emily is particularly interested in what it can help us figure out about the rocks beneath our feet, because she’s also a geologist. When she’s not building beamlines, she’s researching how the metals that we need for renewable energy technologies are distributed and move around in Earth’s crust.
An aerial view of the Australian Synchrotron.
Why did you choose this career pathway?
I have been a Synchrotron fan girl ever since I went on field trip there when I was in high school and it was being built. In my second year of uni, my whole family (keep in mind I’m the youngest child of 3) went together to the Synchrotron Open Day and my siblings and I bought matching Synchrotron t-shirts. I never knew that geoscientists could work at the Synchrotron until a geologist I know started working there! When I saw a Beamline Scientist job advertised there, I jumped at the opportunity to apply.
The benefits are that I still get to do my geoscience research if I want to, but in a completely zero pressure way. I like doing research, so this is great for me! I also love working collaboratively, which is essential at the Synchrotron.
ANSTO is a large organisation, which provides me with opportunities to get involved in science communication, outreach, and diversity and inclusion. After my PhD I worked in science policy for a few years, so I love being able to use my policy skills alongside my science skills. I also enjoy that by helping other researchers do their science I feel like I’m part of something bigger than just my niche area of rocks.
Like most STEM workplaces, ANSTO has a very male-dominated workforce. We are working on changing this, and have targets in place to achieve change, but there are always challenges in changing the culture of a workplace that has been historically male dominated. Having said that, there is now a fantastic, extremely supportive, and ever-growing group of women who make me love going to work.
Emily operating a drone for the first time.
How did you get to your current role?
I’ve had a meandering and unconventional start to my career! After my PhD I didn’t know what I wanted to do except that I knew it wasn’t industry or academia (which I thought were my only two options). An email circulated around my uni department about a Science Policy Graduate Internship at the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering. I had no idea what policy was, but it was a job, so I applied. Despite having to Google “what is policy” before the interview, I got the job and went on to work there for almost 3 years, followed by just under a year as a Senior Policy Officer at the Australian Council of Learned Academies.
Policy was fun, important, and high impact work and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but eventually missed doing science rather than just researching it for policy recommendations.
I landed a job as a postdoctoral researcher in Perth at the Geological Survey of Western Australia and University of South Australia as part of the MinEx Cooperative Research Centre. It was great to be back in research again, and I was pleased to bust the myth that you can’t return to research once you leave.
I loved my job and living in Perth, but my family, friends and partner all lived in Melbourne, and COVID (more specifically, WA’s hard state border) meant that I didn’t see them for 10 months. So when I saw my current role advertised at the Australian Synchrotron, I applied and got the job.
How well did your degree prepare you for your career path?
I use my technical geology skills and knowledge for my research, but I’m surprised how often in my career I use the other skills I learnt during my PhD.
I was surprised how easy I found working in science policy, and it realised it was easy because I was building on skills I’d already developed during my PhD: research, science communication, interrogating information, project management, and writing.
I think the real value of an Earth science degree is learning how to learn, and how to solve scientific puzzles, often with incomplete datasets (in the case of geoscience especially).
Emily looking at drill core at the Perth Core Library.
Emily sitting atop Mount Buller
What are the best parts about your job? What are the hardest parts?
The best part of my job is getting to work at a particle accelerator. Let’s be honest, it’s just objectively cool. Every day I learn something new and I love the challenge. I also love that I’m working in a job completely outside my field, but still get to do research within my field too. It’s a win-win!
The hardest part about my job is kind of the same as the best part. My job is all physics, chemistry, and engineering, and I’ve never studied any of those. I do learn something new every day, but sometimes the amount of stuff I still need to learn is really overwhelming. Sometimes I have down days where it all seems too much and like I’m in way over my head. When that happens, I focus on the things I can do, and how far I’ve come already.
What advice would you give to students in your study area trying to decide on a career path?
Try everything you’re interested in! You might love a job or hate it, but with everything you try, you’ll learn something more about what you want your career to look like.
It might not be that you discover a specific job you want to do, but that in general you have a passion for using certain skills in whatever job you do. Even just learning what skills you want to use will help you decide what to do for your next job.
It’s great to move around to figure out what you like, to keep your career interesting, or to take opportunities when they arise.
Part of the (not yet complete) Medium Energy X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (MEX) beamline that Emily works on at the Australian Synchrotron.
Looking over Ballachulish in western Scotland, where Emily did part of her PhD fieldwork.
What were your career worries and expectations when you were at uni?
I never knew what I wanted to do for a job, so I was worried about finding something that I loved. I’ve realised only recently that most people don’t plan their careers. In fact, I think an unplanned career is the best kind of career because it means you can take exciting opportunities when they come along.
All through my university degrees I struggled with feeling like I was a real geologist. Other students and academic staff wanted to chat about rocks during lunch, or visit outcrops during their holidays and weekends. I definitely did not. I like geology, but I also like a lot of other things and don’t want to talk or think about my work constantly. This made me feel like I didn’t have the same passion as my fellow geoscientists and that therefore I couldn’t succeed in the geoscience.
The reality is that there are all different people and personalities in geoscience, and science more broadly. All different kinds of people have great success in a whole array of science careers, and there are many different ways to be an Earth scientist.