Profiles of Women in Science: Cathy M. Stinear, Director of the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Medicine, and Pro Vice‐Chancellor Equity, University of Auckland, New Zealand

The European Journal of Neuroscience (EJN) is pleased to introduce Professor Cathy M. Stinear,1 whom we are featuring as part of our series Profiles of Women in Science. We initiated this series to raise the visibility and recognition of women scientists in our community (Helmreich et al. 2017). You can find all of the previous profiles here. The series aligns with other EJN activities to promote diversity in academia (see Helmreich et al. 2021; Willis et al. 2023) and is supported by the Alba Network. A brief description of Professor Stinears background and work: Cathy Stinear earned her degrees in Chiropractic and Physiology after first completing her training as a commercial pilot and flying instructor. Combining her work in private clinical practice with postgraduate courses, she next pursued her PhD at the University of Auckland, studying focal hand dystonia. Over the past decades, Cathy Stinear has focused her research on stroke rehabilitation and techniques to predict stroke outcomes. She and her team explore the use of noninvasive methods such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to improve and predict motor outcomes after stroke. Their prediction tools are now used in clinical practice to help patients, families, and clinical teams set appropriate rehabilitation goals. Her work has been cited manifold, ranking her among the most-cited neuroscientists from New Zealand and in the top 2% of scientists worldwide. Cathy Stinear was appointed as a Full Professor at the University of Auckland in 2019. Over the past 4 years, she combined this with her position as the Pro Vice-Chancellor Equity, providing strategic leadership for the University's DEI efforts. In 2020, she assumed the position of Chair of the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand, becoming the first woman to hold this role. Professor Stinear has served the neuroscience community in many ways, including as a reviewing editor of the European Journal of Neuroscience. For more details, see her webpage. Can You Tell Us Something About Your Youth and the Family You Grew up in? “I was born in Auckland, where I grew up for 8 years. And then our family moved to the US—my father, mother, me, and my two younger brothers. My parents met when they both worked as medical technicians in the same lab. After running his own business, my father decided to train as a chiropractor in the US. At that time, there was no possibility of training in New Zealand, something he later changed by founding the New Zealand College of Chiropractic. And so we left. My mother also qualified in the US; she became a chiropractic assistant. On their student visas, they were not allowed to accept any paid work in the US, so we had to get by with very limited resources. After my parents received their qualifications, we returned to New Zealand, where they continued to work as a team. They have approached everything in their lives as a joint project: Raising a family, running a practice together, and, these days, supporting my brother and his wife in raising their two kids. Their view on life echoes in my own. Being exposed to this early environment enriched my life. It made me outward-looking and interested in healthcare—in how the human body works, how one can help other people. I guess I have a natural tendency toward the science subjects. In high school, I loved subjects like music and was involved in theater, but it was purely for enjoyment. When it came to choosing a direction, I was drawn to the natural sciences. My high school years were in the 1980s. The general idea back then, at least in New Zealand, was that girls could do anything, although nobody warned us that girls cannot do everything all at the same time! Still, this idea of unlimited possibilities resonated with me, and since I wanted to choose an independent path in life (to be expected from a teenager, right?) I decided to leave school during my final year. I had already obtained my qualification for university entrance the year before, so that final year seemed entirely superfluous. Besides, I did not want to go to university, unlike the girls around me, who all had clear ideas about their futures as doctors or lawyers. I had no clue what I wanted to become. At that time, New Zealand had a left-wing prime minister who won a battle with the rather conservative Air Force to allow women to join the higher ranks, rather than only in supportive roles. Because of this, women could be trained as combat pilots. Somehow, this planted the idea in me that I could train to become a pilot, not in the air force but commercially. I trained at a private flying school and was fortunate in that my parents could help me financially, as this was a huge investment. Attending the flying school meant I had to leave home, aged 17. That was a formative experience. I enjoyed flying enormously. I got my private license first, then a commercial one. And then I moved to Australia, where I also obtained a commercial license as well as training to be a flying instructor. I liked teaching trainee pilots one-on-one and designing training programs to see what worked for each person, making sure they mastered both theoretical and practical skills. In short, turning them into a competent and confident person. It was such a valuable basis for my later work as an academic, when I started training master's and doctoral students.” So, How Did You End Up in the Academic World After Such a Start? “Aviation was a hard industry for women in the early 90s, and I needed a change to keep learning in a different environment. When I left aviation and returned to Auckland, some people were shocked that I had spent all this time and money to become a pilot, only to leave it for an uncertain future. Their response surprised me because it suggested I was throwing away all my experience as a pilot and instructor. But, of course, none of that was lost. It made me a more mature and determined student than I would have been if I had gone to university right after high school. I took all my experience up to then with me. The irony of this step was not lost on me: As a teenager, I had sworn not to enter university. And here I was, attending the College of Chiropractic and the Physiology program at the University of Auckland, while working part-time to earn my way through college. After graduating, I had to wait to start my own practice for administrative reasons. So, I thought: Why do I not take some post-graduate courses in the meantime? I loved it! So, even when I finally could go into practice, I stayed in the post-graduate program and started my PhD. My clinical training and experience led me to focus my PhD project on the human body and clinical neuroscience. That was also the time when I put my toolbox in place: Neurophysiology and behavioral assessment. It was a deliberate choice; I did not opt for genetic sequencing, or working at the cellular level, nor for epidemiology. No, I was interested in the human nervous system and its diseases. During my time as a PhD student, I applied my tools to the study of dystonia. Later, I focused more on stroke, but still used the same toolbox with the addition of neuroimaging.” Can You Tell Us Something About Your Research? And About the Field's Future, as You See It? “We aim to identify biomarkers to predict motor outcomes for our patients. In 2007, we published a paper in Brain, in which we assessed the functional integrity of the corticospinal tract using TMS and diffusion-weighted MRI in chronic stroke patients (Stinear et al. 2007). It turned out that patients with motor-evoked responses to TMS had more potential for further improvements in motor performance than those without. This set us off thinking: How can we use tools such as TMS to predict outcomes? Earlier studies had already pointed in this direction, but had not yet turned the TMS biomarker into something clinically useful. Our mission became to combine biomarkers with other parameters, such as age and clinical scores, to predict motor outcomes for individual patients. Our subsequent studies were the first to demonstrate the potential of combining biomarkers and other measures into a systematic prediction tool that is clinically useful. This approach may seem obvious now, but it wasn't back then. We have built a publicly accessible website that explains the PREP2 prediction tool (PREP=Predict REcovery Potential), which is freely available for others to use, and we continually refine it. Because we receive questions from all around the world, we know it is used by others, although not routinely, as for some patients, it requires the application of TMS, which is not available everywhere. We're working with implementation experts and are conducting a large multi-site study in the US to continue improving the tool and make it more accessible to clinical teams. I am quite confident that over the next decade, rehabilitation practice will shift away from group-level findings to insights applicable at the individual level. By using biomarkers and prediction tools, we will take much of the guesswork out of people's recovery and likely outcomes and will be able to manage the sequelae of their condition better. It will also help us design better clinical trials by stratifying patients more meaningfully. We have already shown that, in principle, this is possible. I consider our work as a proof-of-concept; it is now for others to pick this up and do new and exciting things.” Which Aspects of Your Job Do You Like Best? And Which Least? “My time is divided between being the Director of the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Medicine for 2 days per week, and being the University's Pro Vice-Chancellor Equity for the rest of the time. Both jobs come with their joys and less enjoyable moments. What I like best about my work as a scientist is the incredible freedom we have to ask and answer our own questions, using all the skills and resources at our disposal. Isn't intellectual autonomy a tremendous privilege and gift? Identifying the less enjoyable sides is more difficult … There are many different answers to this. Political interference and the publishing system we have to deal with … these are big challenges for all of us. I keep being dismayed by how the current publishing model prioritizes quantity over quality, only because that is most profitable for big publishing houses. People are charged to publish and read articles that report on work for which the community has already paid via the taxpayers' money and in which scientists invest a lot of free labor as reviewers. The perverse incentives, the negative influence of impact factors—in my view, the model is broken, and we urgently need to fix it. When it comes to my university leadership role, I find it incredibly rewarding. I put my hand up for the position when the previous Pro Vice-Chancellor Equity retired because I feel strongly about the area. Even though some of my colleagues encouraged me to apply, I had no expectations of getting the position because my managerial experience to that point was somewhat limited, having served only as the department's deputy head and as a member of the faculty's staffing committee. But having worked for a long time in rehabilitation, I do understand the issues of disability and how they intersect with gender and ethnicity. And, of course, I have my own lived experiences to draw from. This role as Pro Vice-Chancellor Equity allows me to improve the university's systems, processes, and culture, so that it is a place where people feel they belong and can thrive. It is so important that people can be who they are and enjoy equitable participation and success in their work and studies. Not all aspects of my job are easy, though. There is a lot of work under the hood—activities to improve systems and processes that nobody will be aware of, but that help improve transparency and fairness. That can be tedious sometimes, but it needs to be done. Having said that, there actually isn't much that I do not like. Some colleagues sometimes remark, a bit exasperated, that I am like Pollyanna: I remain positive, though not naively so; my positivity is grounded in reality. My background has helped me. I have moved around a lot, been in different professional circles. So, my identity is not tightly linked to my profession; there is more going on in the world. And working in clinical practice also helps to put things in perspective. One time, a long time ago, I was grumbling a bit to a colleague with whom I shared an office in the hospital. He calmly listened and then said, ‘Just remember, Cath, there are people dying downstairs.’ It was such a good reminder that whatever work thing is currently annoying, none of it really matters. He was so right. It made me aware of what a good life I have. Whatever my complaints are: It is all small potatoes.” Who Inspired You? Did You Have Influential Mentors? “One might think perhaps my father? Yes, I was influenced by my parents, and their willingness to change direction in life, but I do not see my Dad specifically as a mentor, and I am sure he would not see himself that way. He's just my lovely Dad, whom I've always looked up to. I find this a difficult question to answer. Perhaps my PhD supervisor? I was fortunate to have an excellent supervisor. But I find it hard to single out particular people. There were so many people who influenced me, opened doors, and had confidence in me. Maybe I wasn't always aware of their help when it happened: Fish can't see the water they are swimming in. In retrospect, I'm grateful to many people. I don't believe in putting people on pedestals, including myself. Everyone has pluses and minuses. Everyone can teach you something. Of course, there are always people who amaze you with their capacities, their resilience, their strength. But these are also everyday people, people around us, people just like us in lots of ways.” What Do You Think of the Position of Women in Neuroscience? “Even though New Zealand has had women in all leading positions, including as prime minister, we still have to deal with patriarchal traditions. Breaking with those traditions doesn't come easy. And I think it's bad for all of us, men and women alike. It keeps people unnecessarily in gendered roles. These days, 60% of our students are female. I always tell the students, ‘Culture might be shaped by history, but this place, this university, is our place. 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