David Llewellyn

Interviewee: David Llewellyn (New South Wales & St John’s 2010) [hereafter ‘DL’] 

Moderator:  Jamie Byron Geller [hereafter ‘JBG’]  

Date of interview: 4 November 2024 

[file begins 00:04] 

JBG: This is Jamie Byron Geller on behalf of the Rhodes Trust, and I am here with David Llewellyn (New South Wales & St John’s 2010) here in Rhodes House, to record Dave’s oral history interview. Today’s date is 4 November 2024 and Dave’s interview will help us to launch the first ever comprehensive Rhodes Scholar oral history project. So, thank you so much, Dave, for joining us in this initiative. Before we jump in, would you mind just saying your full name for the recording? 

DL: David Llewellyn. 

JBG: Wonderful. And David, do I have your permission to record audio and video of this interview. 

DL: Absolutely. Yes. 

JBG: Okay. So, I’m delighted to be having this interview in Rhodes House. So, is Oxford home for you? 

DL: Well, I think that’s actually, probably, a more difficult and probing question than anticipated. I realised the other day, I’ve lived in Oxford longer than I’ve ever lived in any individual town or city anywhere in the world. And so, yes, I live here, with my partner, and so, in a way, that’s home. But I think home’s a complex thing. I think, at heart, I would still call this tiny little town on the coast of New South Wales home. That’s my identity. But I live in Oxford and Oxford is great. So, yes, split allegiances to home. 

JBG: Okay. What is that little town? 

DL: Well, it’s near a town called Forster, which is about three or four hours’ drive north of Sydney.  

JBG: Okay. And is that where you were born? 

DL: I was actually born in Sydney, but when I was very young, moved up to near Forster with my family and so, grew up in that area? 

JBG: Great. And when were you born? 

DL: I was born in the cold winter of 1987. So, August 1987. 

JBG: And what was that experience like, growing up in Forster? 

DL: Well, it was actually magical, in so many ways. As I said, I was born in Sydney, but when we were quite young –I have an older sister – we moved up to this tiny little town. At the time, Forster probably had a couple of thousand people, and we lived 30 minutes outside of that, in the middle of nowhere. And it’s only much later I realised what a sacrifice that must have been for our parents. Mum had been an academic, and Dad worked in  biology in the civil service in Sydney, and at a reasonably early stage in their careers, they moved to this tiny little place.  

But as a kid it was just  phenomenal. We spent all our time riding bikes and out in the bush, making cubby houses, or at the beach, surfing, or doing all those sorts of things. So, just exploring the world with very few limitations. And I wouldn’t trade it in for the world. But it’s  only now, as an adult, that I realise what an amazing opportunity our parents gave us. I mean, they had their own reasons for making that move, but it was definitely a very different childhood to what it would have been had we grown up somewhere in the city. 

JBG: And so, did you say you have siblings? 

DL: Yes, an older sister. She’s a couple of years older than me. 

JBG: Great. And I would love to know, Dave, a little bit about your earliest educational experiences. So, maybe, primary and high school, what those were like. 

DL: Yes. So, I went to a little primary school, called Pacific Palms primary school, which was near where we lived. It had maybe 200 or 300 kids. It was right on the beach, on the east coast of New South Wales. So, for example, in our yearly cross-country running race, you had to run down along the sand, get extremely tired, and then back up to school. 

JBG: Wow. 

DL: But yes, where were we were, there was one little state primary school, which was an amazing place, and some of my first interests in science were definitely fostered at that place.  

And then, at high school, I went to Forster High, which was a 30- or 40-minute bus ride away to get there on the school bus. And, again, that was the only school in the whole area. It was quite big, maybe 1500 kids, and – I talk about this a lot with mates now – the thing I loved about that is, because it was the only option in the area, it had the full cross-section of society. You had the doctors’ kids, and you had the bricklayers’ kids, and you had  people from slightly higher socio-economic backgrounds, people from very low socio-economic backgrounds, indigenous Australians, white Australians, all in the same place. And everyone was just a kid, having a good time and learning and doing their thing, all with different interests.  

So, it was this amazing… well, I loved it, because it was such a melting pot of people from the area that came together. And  I have the conversation often with people about how that was compared to going to a school in a city or something. I think the opportunities were different there, but they were also incredible in their own way. Like, because we were in a coastal town on the beach, our school sports were doing things like surfing or kayaking, and the school became, by complete chance, because they had two very interested teachers, one of the best schools in the country at kayaking and one of the best schools in the country at volleyball. And they’re very uncommon sports in Australia. Normally, you’d be playing netball or rugby or cricket or something like that, and our school wasn’t particularly good at any of those things, but we just had these really enthusiastic teachers. But that was an amazing opportunity to get involved in something like that, do something like that.  

And while I do think everyone somewhat builds up their own experience and thinks that’s the way to do it and the best thing, for me I really loved that experience and wouldn’t trade it in for the world. I think, could you have been pushed more in one way or another in a different place? Possibly, probably, but the life experiences and the friendships formed there and the things we got to do were pretty awesome, and something I certainly am extremely grateful for. 

JBG: That’s really lovely. 

DL: Yes, well, it’s a special place. Maybe I’m overly defensive of this little town up on the coast, but I do think it provided opportunities for me, and I’m just one person, but for me, that I think I would have struggled to get in other places. 

JBG: I can see why that is still home. 

DL: Yes, exactly. 

JBG: It’s really lovely.

DL: Well now we live in a house in Oxford that’s right by the river here, and my partner teases me because I grew up in this area called the Great Lakes, by the beach, by these lakes. I spent all my childhood  frolicking around in the water and went to school and would go kayaking and go surfing and do all these things. So, I have this weird affinity, and home feels like anywhere where there’s some body of water nearby. So, when we looking for a place to live in Oxford, my partner put her head in our hands and was, like, ‘We’ve got to find a place by the river, don’t we?’ and I was, like, ‘Yes, please.’ Because it’s just part of that feeling, you know, feeling at home and feeling positive, having good mental health, and all those things. 

JBG: Yes. You mentioned in elementary school your interest in science being sparked, and I was wondering if you would mind sharing a little bit more about that. 

DL: Yes. So, what I was thinking of when I was thinking about that was that I had this one teacher who, I guess, was just really a handyman. He was really interested in teaching science but getting kids to build things and test things. So, we would spend our time making plastic boats out of milk cartons with little propellers on them, and then taking them up to a mate’s swimming pool, who lived next door to the school, and racing them through the swimming pool and then talking about how boats floated or how propellers worked. Or I remember we did something where we had to build windmills which pumped water. All of these building things and games, I guess, sparked an excitement in science. Maybe more the engineering science side of things. [10:00]  

But the flip side was that I was very lucky that my parents were biologists, and when we left Sydney, they were in this little town with not necessarily a lot to do. My mum eventually retrained and became a teacher, but for a good period of time while we were growing up, they started a little environmental consulting business, where they would go out and do ecological surveys on sites where a development was going to happen or they needed to understand what the flora and fauna in an area was. And to me, as a little kid, from five years old, I’d pull on the wellies and I’d traipse after them through swamps and the mosquitoes, catching frogs and snakes and birds, all these sorts of things, and it was just magical. You can, sort of, imagine, as a little kid seeing the world from a below-the-grass-eye view, and something, perhaps an owl flying out of a tree, or whatever it would be. I just loved being out in nature and seeing the incredible diversity and tapestry of these animals and plants that lived together.  

And so, I like to think that I charted my own path and I did my own thing, but then, I became a biologist, so it’s a bit, like, ‘Oh, maybe I was a bit more manipulated than I thought I was.’ But I think it’s partly because, from that early age, I saw how exciting or how fun that could be and really developed an interest in those sorts of things. And so, in my final year of high school, I wasn’t really enjoying biology. I was doing biology as a subject but I wasn’t really enjoying it at all. I remember really seriously thinking about dropping it totally. I was doing history and I was really loving history and thought ‘Oh, maybe I’ll do more of this.’ In the end, the only reason I kept biology at school – and then, when I was at uni, I really loved it – was because I was, like, ‘No, I know this can be fun. I know you can do this and you can make a job out of it or you can just make an interest out of it, and it can be really interesting and a lot of fun.’ I think without that role model and inspiration, I probably would have gone a very, very different path. So, on the one hand, I did think that I’d trodden my own path, on the other hand, I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity to have those experiences which have definitely, in some way, directed where I’ve gone. 

JBG: Yes. So, did you end up studying biology at the University of Sydney? 

DL: Yes, I did. So, biology and then some physiology or human biology. But again, when I started at Sydney, I did a whole variety of things. I did a science degree, so, I was broadly doing sciences, but I did some maths and physics and chemistry, a bit of everything, not really sure where or what I would do, but knowing that I loved science, I loved asking questions, I loved trying to figure out how to figure out questions. And so, I always enjoyed science, but it was very much ‘Oh, well, we’re going to suck it and see what comes out of this.’ 

JBG: And I know you mentioned, it sounds like, sports and the outdoors being really key to your childhood. Did those hobbies continue into your college years, or were there other hobbies that pulled at your time? 

DL: Yes. I mean, I’m probably a bit flippant, I get interested in lots of stuff and I love doing lots of different bits and pieces. Through school, especially, I started kayaking, and then that became much more serious and I got the opportunity to travel the world doing that, which is awesome. So, that became a big part of life for me, but also my community, and what I did. Into the latter years of uni, as that started to fade away there was, and maybe still, a bit of an identity crisis on that being a big part of who I was and did I do it as well as I could have, or could I have done something differently to really see how far I could have gone? But anyway, that became a big part of life.  

I also, and I’m not saying I was very good at all, but I did some drama, which I loved doing, and played soccer and things like that on the weekends, so, was very happy to dip my toe into anything anyone who would let me come along to, and I was happy to come along, independent of ability. 

JBG: And as you were moving through university, did you always have a sense that some kind of grad school would be probably the next step? 

DL: Yes, that’s a good question. I think the short answer is ‘No.’ I’m not a very good planner. I’m not one of these people that has this, ‘Oh, you know, in five years, I’ll be doing this,’ or, ‘In ten years, I’ll be doing this.’ So, a bit more of a ‘See what comes, see what opportunities come up.’ But I think I knew that I liked learning, and I still love that, and so, I could see that maybe doing something at grad school or a further degree, would be a way of continuing that thing that I enjoyed. But what that would look like, and certainly at the beginning, starting uni, that was not really part of the plan. It was, ‘Okay, let’s go to university, learn, try and figure out a little bit about where my interest areas lie,’ but without too much direction.  

I think at the time I was starting uni I was also moving back to Sydney for the first time since being five years old. So, moving to a new place, also thinking about, ‘Do I want to do uni full-time or do I want to do it part-time and paddle and do other things?’ So, there were all of those things melting around in the head at the time, and eventually what happens, happens, but it was probably only much later, in the last couple of years of that degree, that I started thinking, ‘Oh, you know, a grad course or PhD would be interesting. 

JBG: Right. And do you recall how you learned about the Rhodes Scholarship specifically? Is that something that had been in your head as you moved through college, or did someone spark that idea for you? 

DL: Well, so, again, this was, much later, one of those things where you realise that - I was very lucky to have a very supportive family - but that they were, maybe, pulling a few more strings than I had thought. So, the short answer is no, I hadn’t. When I decided, ‘Oh, I’d be keen to do grad study,’ I was quite keen to look at overseas opportunities, and so, of course, the Rhodes came up as one of those. So, in my mind, that was the time where I became aware of Rhodes. Then at that time, when putting the application together, it came out - and maybe I should have known this - that my grandfather had been on Rhodes, and I have a cousin who had as well. And I, sort of had known - I don’t know, this is stupid, I should have known - I had known that my grandparents had lived in Oxford and my mum, who is the youngest of four, that some of her siblings were born in Oxford - she was born in Australia, but some of her siblings were born in Oxford.  

So, I had known that they had spent time here. And then, when I was growing up, I had this much older cousin, who I knew had been in the UK and was a doctor and had done things. But yes, it’s probably naïve now, but in hindsight I hadn’t really put those things together. So I was sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, It would, kind of, be cool if I could do some grad study overseas somewhere,’ so I applied to some American things and some things in the UK, ‘Oh, there’s this Rhodes thing, maybe I should do that.’ My mum was, like, ‘Oh, yes, that’s the scholarship my father had.’ I was, like, ‘What the hell?’ So, anyway, yes, it’s maybe a more convoluted answer to the question, but yes, maybe I was sleeping there as a child and my mum was sitting there singing these words into my ears. Not that I’m aware of, but you never know. 

JBG: And do you recall the experience of learning that you’d been selected for the Scholarship? 

DL: Yes, absolutely. So, I had the great privilege, just a couple of days ago, of coming here to when the Global Scholars for this year were interviewed and then announced, which made me think about all my experience. So, I remember going to the governor’s house in New South Wales, which is in [20:00] Sydney, in these beautiful parks, a big, beautiful sandstone building, where the interviews were held, and wearing my suit that I’d bought from the local charity shop which didn’t really fit properly, and being really nervous but also stoked to have the opportunity. And thinking ‘This is unlikely to come through but it’s cool to be here.’ So, I sat outside, chatting to the security guard, which was the this big guy from one of the Pacific Islands, and that was actually so good for me. He was a lovely dude, but he just asked ‘Oh, yes, what are you doing here?’ and said ‘Good luck.’ It just really took some of the edge off. So, I sat outside for half an hour, chatting to this guy, and then went in and did the interviews which actually were a lot of fun. You know, you’re sitting there sweating into your boots, but it was actually really enjoyable.  

And then, at the end, they got us all together in a line, the finalists, and said ‘Thank you, everyone, and congratulations  Dave, you’ve got the Scholarship,’ which was a crazy experience. An out-of-body experience. Because I was obviously so thrilled, but at the same time, there were five or six other people standing in this line whose names had not been read out. So, on the one hand you’re really happy, but on the other hand, some people that, over the last few days, you’ve got to know a bit and are really lovely haven’t been chosen for that opportunity. So, it was bittersweet, but obviously, afterwards, a couple of hours later, I called friends and family, hands shaking on the phone, being, like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ So, that was pretty exciting.  

JBG: That’s really great. Your mom must have been very excited. 

DL: I think, yes… No, she definitely was. She’s also, like, pretty pragmatic-, she was, like, ‘Oh, I knew you could do it. Well done.’ But I think since then, I’ve lived here now almost 15 years, and she’s been able to come and visit, which has been wonderful. Especially because it’s a place that’s been important in some of her family’s life – not her, she was born and raised in Australia – it’s been really nice for her to come and see some of the places - ‘Oh, this is where family used to live,’ or this is where her dad used to work: these sorts of things. So yes, without really realising it, it’s been a nice circularity for her, I think.  

JBG: Yes, that’s really nice. And had you spent any time in the UK yourself before getting the Scholarship? 

DL: No. It was my first time, I remember when I came over, I actually packed everything into my backpack and backpacked across Europe to get to the UK. But strangely, at the time, the cheapest flight was actually going via London, so, I landed in London, spent, two hours in Heathrow, and then flew to Rome to start this trip across Europe. So, before I properly landed, I had two hours looking out the window at Heathrow thinking ‘It is a sunny day. It’s not as grey as they say it is.’ But then, a month later, I arrived for the first time and yes, had never been, stayed in a friend’s little flat above a Marks & Spencer’s in London for a night before getting the bus up to Oxford and I remember getting on the bus from London and, every little town I passed was, like, ‘Oh, is that Oxford? Is that Oxford?’ It was like ‘Oh, there’s a church spire. Maybe that’s it,’ and I did that continuously for an hour, until you finally driving over the bridge into town and Magdalen sits up there and it’s, like, ‘Oh, wow. Okay, this is pretty cool.’  

JBG: That’s really amazing. And did you live in college when you arrived in Oxford? 

DL: Yes. Yes, I did, which, again, was a cool experience. So, yes, I lived in St John’s. It was amazing to be there. For me, the biggest community, or part of my community, was the Rhodes community. I think by chance, I was able to make some really amazing friends, which I hold to this day, in that group. So, for some people, their biggest community was their college or their department, or something else, but for me, it happened to be Rhodes. So, it was wonderful living at John’s and being part of that community, but still, I guess I was drawn a little more to the Rhodes one. 

JBG: And we talked a little bit when we last spoke about the time that you spent in Rhodes House and some of the events that you attended and how meaningful those were, and I was wondering if you would mind sharing a little bit about that.  

DL: Yes, absolutely. I guess I started, and Don Markwell (Queensland & Trinity 1981) was the Warden at the time, and you don’t know what it used to be like previously. But for us on day one, Rhodes House was this big open space for us to come and meet people and use, and I later learned that that was only a reasonably recent thing. In previous generations, the House had been a bit more closed up. So from the get-go, there were events where the whole group of Scholars that lived in Oxford at the time would come together for a drinks reception, or whatever, and Don was actually amazing and as soon as he saw you talking to someone you knew, he would come and pull you and say, ‘No, you’ve got to meet this person.’ So, by the end, I knew every single person in my year and probably a year plus or minus a couple, so, it was a really great way of creating this sense of community.  

So, I loved that, and the other thing that I think, for me, was probably one of the most unique things was, pretty regularly – I reckon, I don’t know exactly, maybe even once a week – there would be a talk at Rhodes House where, often, a Rhodes Alum, but not always, sometimes just a really interesting person from the community, would come and talk about what they did, and you got this opportunity to sit there in a group of sometimes ten, sometimes 80 people, and listen to them and their expertise, and it was stuff I’d never heard of or thought of or knew anything about. So, you’d go and hear an author speak about how they use writing to talk about political issues in the place that they live, or you’d hear a historian or linguist or whatever, all of these different things, and people talking about what they did, and I think, for me, it was just such a mind-opening and eye-opening experience. And you, then, as some little nobody sitting in the audience, got to, if you had one, ask a question to this amazing person who happened to be the leading judge in the country that they lived in, or whatever. And then afterwards, there was often time to just mill around and speak to them or speak to other Scholars who’d come along, and so, I think it made my learning experience here so much richer. Yes, I did a PhD in medical science and I learned a bunch of very niche stuff about medical science, but the lessons I learnt from those conversations, both hearing people and talking to people, I think probably have shaped how I think more than any of the formal academic work I did here.  

JBG: And you said your PhD is in medical science? 

DL: That’s right, yes.  

JBG: Okay. 

DL: Actually, now, I get to say that I worked in the lab that made the Oxford Covid vaccine. All of that happened after I left, so, I deserve exactly zero credit for any of that, but I’m lucky enough to know some of the people who do amazing work there. But I was working on malaria at the time, and so, in a group working on malaria vaccines, which, again, was super interesting and something I was very lucky to be able to do. 

JBG: Wonderful. And, when in your Oxford time did your journey with DJS Antibodies start? 

DL: Yes. So, a good question. So, I was working in this lab on malaria vaccines. So, probably, the real answer to that is, on almost the first day I was there, maybe a week later, or something, another guy started in the lab, and his name was Joe, Joe Illingworth. So, we were just two PhD students doing our things. We were in the same group, so, both on malaria, but he was doing something slightly different, and over the course of four years of the PhD, we were just students who would share ideas, help each other out, lab partners. When someone needed something, the other one would chip in. [30:00] There was always, always a fight over desk space in our lab, because the lab had grown hugely, but the space hadn’t, so, we both sat on a desk, about this big [gestures to table] and you almost had to link arms to be able to type. So, while there was nothing – like, we never really had any ideas – especially towards the end of it, we had talked about what would we do? We both were starting to apply for postdoc positions in various places, and we’d sort of said casually, whilst sitting in a lab, in a hood, doing work, ‘Oh, it would be cool one day to maybe start a company. That would be a fun thing to do. Oh, I don’t really have any ideas on what we would do, but that would be quite fun.’  

And then, it was much later that, I think-, I can’t remember the exact timing, but basically, an email dropped into my inbox saying ‘Biotech business plan competition, £100,000 prize, apply,’ and so, I went to Joe and said, ‘Hey, we should just write something here, because hopefully, we’ll just learn what is biotech, right? Like, how do people do start-ups? What’s even involved?’ And so, we came up with this pretty hare-brained idea which was, to be honest, nothing to do with the work we were doing, but about ‘Oh, maybe we could make antibodies to these proteins that are really important in lots of disease but people have really struggled to make antibodies against, and if you could do that, they could be good drugs.’ So, we wrote that, we got into this accelerator programme and spent a couple of weeks going to talks and things that they put on and learning about it. We then got a mentor which helped us develop our one-page business plan into a five-page business plan. And out of that, across the course of, I don’t know, probably a year-, well, we didn’t win. We went to this big gala dinner, black tie, looking all fancy, and it was like, ‘And the winner is,’ and it wasn’t us. And we were so stoked. We were, like, ‘Hey, we’ve learned so much. This is amazing.’  

But then, at the celebration in the pub afterwards, Joe, who’s just a super-interested chatty guy, goes up to the bar to buy a beer and there’s some older guy sitting there, and so, he just starts chatting to him. And so, I don’t know, two hours later, I look over, and Joe is still sitting at the bar, chatting to this guy. I’m, like, ‘Okay, whatever.’ And it was probably  three weeks later or something, we get this call from this person who says, ‘Oh, this is my name, I work with Johnson & Johnson. I do all their innovation stuff. Joe spoke to me at the bar for a couple of hours and we’d like to fund you guys to test your idea.’ So, this very random conversation was extremely fortuitous, and J&J then gave us a little bit of money to do one or two experiments, and that was where it all started. 

JBG: Wow. 

DL: And that was the point where we were, like, ‘Okay, are we going to do this?’ And I was, like, ‘Okay, yes,’ and I quit the uni job and then started working out of my bedroom on Iffley Road which didn’t have a bed and just had a seat and just had a mattress on the floor, trying to sketch out ‘What’s the one experiment that we’re going to be able to do with this one tiny amount of money?’ But yes, the rest, sort of, flowed on from there. 

JBG: And it sounds like you and Joe had done some brainstorming throughout your PhD programme, but prior to that email landing in your inbox, had you thought about entrepreneurship? Is that a direction that you potentially envisioned for yourself?  

DL: Not really. I mean, as I said before, I’m not the world’s best person in setting out a strict plan. But I think I had learned that I liked research, I liked doing science, trying to discover things, and other than saying, ‘Oh, working in a little start-up might be fun,’ no. So, when we started, we were the guys that went round to these events or little industry conferences and just looked like complete idiots. We would go and ask questions and people would be, like, ‘You have to know the answer. You can’t be here unless you know the answer to that question.’ I remember going and when we were trying to raise some money, pitching our idea to this person, and being, like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this idea. We want, like, £100,000,’ and this lady just sat there, very straight-faced, and was, like, ‘The minimum investment we do is £10 million, and we only do them for things that are doing clinical trials,’ and we were just, like, ‘Oh. Tell us about that.’ And so, she then, very graciously did tell us a bit about how investors think, or how she thinks about investment. And so, it was learning through being open idiots and just trying to ask questions and hopefully being humble about the fact that we didn’t know very much, that we learnt a lot. So, I guess I’m sort of saying ‘No.’ Had we thought about it more, we might have gone and tried to learn a bit about entrepreneurship before doing it, but I actually think the trial by fire and learning on the ground was also a great way to do it. 

JBG: And what was exciting to you and Joe about this antibody work specifically? What was the hope for what would become of your work? 

DL: Well, I think, originally, the motivation was probably that, ‘Hey, we like doing research.’ Both of us like that. We’re both interested in science. And doing it in a small company was a way, as pretty junior scientists, of being able to have a bit more agency in what we did. So,  on day one, ‘Hey, we’re the bosses. We make the decisions. Do we follow this line of inquiry or this one? Shall we do this experiment or this one?’ ‘We’re trying to vaguely discover if we can make drugs using this thing: how shall we do that?’ And I think we, in part, saw that it could easily be ten plus years in academia before getting the same level of autonomy in what we did. There might have been other ways, but that is how it felt at the time.  

So, firstly, it was this level of, ‘Hey, we get to do what we dreamed of,’ which is ‘We’re doing research and we’re using our brains. We actually get to decide on what research we do.’ So, I think it was as simple as that, to begin with. Over time, that evolved to, ‘Hey, if this works, we could make a drug that could be used to treat patients which currently have absolutely no treatment options and have horrific diseases,’ and that became pretty strongly motivating. But I think, for us, it took a little while to even believe that that could be possible. It wasn’t on day one, like, ‘Oh, we’re going to make a drug, we’re going to save the world.’ It was, like, ‘Oh, let’s just follow our interests. Let’s do something that we enjoy doing,’ and then, yes, over time, I guess, the picture started to be painted: ‘Oh, this is starting to work. Actually, it looks like it might work. Oh, we could use this to make a drug that if we do it in the right direction, could really help people.’  

So, yes, again, I wouldn’t say it was this divine idea at the beginning, ‘Hey, this is how we’re going to change the world,’ but over time, that evolved. And still, today, drug development is a very long process, so, who knows? The drugs that we developed and the team in Oxford is still developing, may go on to be great, or they may, like lots of research projects, not make it. We hope they make it all the way, and it’s looking good, but time will tell. 

JBG: You started to share a little bit about, after you received that first investment, what that looked like for you logistically, in terms of working in your room and mattress on the floor, and I was wondering if you would mind just sharing more about those earliest years, as you were really starting to build this. 

DL: Yes. So, in the biotech space, I think it’s much more common to take some project that’s been developed inside a university or something for ten years, get a whole bunch of intellectual property or patents on that, spin it out into a company, raise ten million dollars, or 50 million dollars, and you’re off to the races. We did, probably, more of thetech software model, which is build it in your garage, very slowly. [40:00] There are pros and cons to that. I wouldn’t necessarily say it was the best thing, but it was great for us, because it gave us an opportunity to learn. So, at the beginning, probably the first six months or so, it was just us sitting, paper-based, trying to design ‘How are we going to do this?’, designing experiments. We knew we had enough money to try these experiments once, and if they didn’t work, we were back on the job market, and if they did work, well, we didn’t really know what would happen then. So, we spent a lot of time thinking about that.  

We eventually rented-, by complete chance, the only place at the time in the UK that had lab space that you could rent, that had all the equipment in it and you could just rent the bench, was in Oxfordshire, about 20 minutes north of Oxford. And so we, eventually, after about six months, hired a bench there, but we only had enough money to hire one bench, and so one of us could go in and do the work and then, when that person left, the other person came in. So, we, kind of, did this shift work for, probably, almost a year, of never both being in the building at the same time, because we only had one bench and we weren’t allowed to have both of us in there. And there were lots of things, like pipette tips, we couldn’t afford, so, we had to go and beg the sales reps to give us a free sample, so we could do our experiment.  

But then, over the course of the first 12 to 18 months, we did this one experiment, tried to make some antibodies to ten targets that no one had ever made an antibody to before, and the first time you look down the microscope at the test you do, it’s completely blank. You see absolutely nothing. You’re, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is-, okay, all this effort is going nowhere,’ and then we made a few tweaks to how we were doing the validation test, and then suddenly looked down the microscope and it lights up like a Christmas tree. And we’ve got this picture which is this super blurry, grainy picture, which looks terrible, but was our, like, moment of, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is working!’ And then, you know, using that process, we showed against all ten targets which no one had made an antibody to, we got an antibody for all of them. 

JBG: Wow. 

DL: And so, that was the moment where we were, like, ‘This is actually something.’ It was, like, ‘Well, we can do something here that people have not been able to do,’ and, maybe, to your previous question, that’s when it, sort of, started-, like, ‘Okay, well, what do you do with this?’  

JBG: Yes. 

DL: You suddenly have this technology or tool that you can believe can do something. Where do you point that? And so, the next phase was thinking about that. I think, to be honest, at the time, we’d, sort of, done that, and we’d run out of money, and so, we needed to go and raise more money. We were still at the stage where no biotech investor would touch you with a ten-foot pole. We were still way too early. We had one experiment which showed-, it was interesting. But by luck, at that time, OSI, which is now OSE, a big funder here in Oxford, was just starting, and they were just making their first investments. So, we met them and we told them what we were doing, spoke to them, and they ended up investing in us.  

Again, I think it’s super lucky. It was a time that they were learning what they were doing, and doing their thing for the first time. No one else would have invested in us, because we were way too early and we’re these two guys who don’t know what they’re doing. But that confluence of time and space and opportunity just meant that we got lucky. And so, then, we got still less than a million - which is not very much for the biotech world - but we got, three quarters of a million pounds to do a series of experiments, which were the next set, which were getting us to the next milestone. And then, I guess the final thing to say is, it was still, at that stage, just Joe and I, and probably for another year, it was just Joe and I, before we made our first hire – this person still works with the team – and then over time, it grew. So, for a very long time, it was just a two- or three-person band banging along, having a huge amount of fun, learning a huge amount, making lots of mistakes, but grinding away, and slowly moving forward. 

JBG: Wow.  

DL: Yes, it’s silly to think of it, in hindsight. I’m not sure I’d do it like that if I did it again, but it was a great experience. 

JBG: And what year was that, that you made your first hire? 

DL: So, the first hire was 2017. 

JBG: Okay. 

DL: And I left the university – I was doing a short postdoc – at the end of 2014, and so, I started in the company January 2015. So, two and a half years of Joe and I banging it out, banging our heads together, before Megan started, who was our first person. 

JBG: Okay. And would you mind sharing a little bit about the difference between being a founder and being a co-founder. I mean, you and Joe have been on this amazing journey together, and I was wondering if you would mind sharing about that and what it is that inspired you to want to do something together, specifically. 

DL: Yes. Again, whether there was any sort of predefined inspiration, I don’t know. I think-, we had definitely, over a number of years working in a PhD lab together, become friends. So, we’re good friends. People ask, ‘Should you start a company with a friend?’ and I think there are very good things about it and there are very bad things about it, and so, weighing both sides up is important. I think the reality is that both Joe and I share a very keen interest in science, but we almost exclusively disagree. In almost everything. So, if there’s a problem we need to solve, Joe will be like, ‘This is how I think we solve it,’ and it will be completely different to how I think we should solve it, and somehow, we developed a relationship that that didn’t become antagonistic, but it became a way of getting a better solution to every problem. So, the final solution was never what I thought it should be at the beginning, and it was almost never what he thought it should be at the beginning, but it was some intersection of both of those.  

And that, having someone that you really trust and respect forcing you to back down from your ideas and rethink them and figure out, ‘Oh, actually, no, I didn’t think about this aspect,’ I think really helped. I mean, the flip side is Joe and I, in many ways, are very different people, and so, come at things from different angles, and so that was very hard at times, and there were times where I’m sure he was, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, why am I working with this guy?’ and there were times where I was, like, ‘Oh, Joe, just please stop doing this thing that you’re doing.’ But I’m super grateful that whatever it is-, that our relationship is such that it got through that and we respect each other. I think, sometimes, we describe it almost as brothers. We can be there arguing - I wouldn’t say we’re shouting, but really vehemently arguing with each other’s ideas. We can be, like, ‘No, that’s idiotic. Don’t do that, it’s this,’ - and then two minutes later, it’s, like, ‘Oh, shall we go get some dinner?’ It was just all water under the bridge. 

JBG: Yes. 

DL: And so, I think, when Megan and other people in the team started, there was a little bit of learning, both from our side and their side, because Joe and I would debate ideas openly, knowing that this was just an intellectual debate, trying to get to the final thing, but someone sitting on the outside would be, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, The bosses are going nuts.’ So, there was a little bit of us all learning that, no, this is actually just set up in a respectful way so that we challenge ideas and we hopefully get to a better solution in the end. So, I think ultimately, right back to the inspiration for doing it together is that we couldn’t have done it by ourselves. Joe has a huge number of skills that I simply don’t have, and I think, I hope, I have at least some skills that he doesn’t have as strongly, and so, it was really the combination of those. While we look very similar – we’re both scientists, we both did PhDs in similar areas – that combination of different approaches was actually the strength of the whole thing.  

JBG: Lovely. And so, you made your first hire in 2017, and then what happened from there? 

DL: Yes. So, 2017, we did that. We keep working, we choose a couple of different directions to point this technology at. So, we want to try and make a drug to a disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which is a lung disease which is very serious, and then we look at some other potential opportunities. And so, we start using the technology to try and make an antibody to the targets that are involved in these diseases. [50:00] And then it becomes a bit more like what a genuine biotech company will do. We have to make the antibody, we need to test in the lab in cellular assays, and we need to figure out if we can test it in some kind of animal model of that disease, which, for us, turned out not to really be possible. So, we started following that path. We got a grant from the UK government. The UK government has an amazing scheme where they have grants and support research and innovation in commercial contexts, and so, we were really lucky that we got a grant that helped us do that.  

At this stage, we’re still probably only four people. We’ve got one extra person. Covid hits: we’re still four people. And somewhat remarkably, Covid probably saved - you know, without Covid - I, out of interest one day, created this graph of our bank account, and you get this investment and then, unlike any rational business, in biotech, you just spend money. You never make any money. So, we get investment, spend, spend, spend, almost run out, get investment, spend, spend, spend, and we were on one of these trajectories, right down to, you know, staring down the pit at zero dollars in the bank account, and Covid hits, and we’re like, ‘Oh, my goodness,  this is a problem.’ But luckily, the government came through with this package to support companies that they had previously supported through grants, just to get them through, and so, that Covid top-up grant, which was associated with the grant we were working on, really helped us to weather the Covid storm, get just enough money to hit the next milestone, and then go out and raise investment.  

So, Covid was a terrible thing and awful for many people, but for us, both because we had lab-based jobs-, so, you couldn’t work from home, we could still work, although we, again, went back to shift work, so, no one was in the lab at the same time, which was really complicated. But we got this little funding windfall which helped us just crawl through, to the point where then, in December 2020, we went out and raised a six-million-pound round. And at that stage, we’re still four people, raised six million, and then, it was October 2022, so, that is, 20 months later, the company was sold. 

JBG: Wow. 

DL: And we had 12 people by that time. So, the company has a very long tail of trickling along with very, very little, very few people, and then we really have this18-month period of getting some investment that anyone would say was the first proper biotech-type investment, growing the team a bit, doing a bunch of science, and then the company being acquired. 

JBG: Wow. So, it started in about 2014. 

DL: Yes. 

JBG: And then sold in 2022. 

DL: Yes. 

JBG: And reflecting on that journey, things that come to mind, for me, are, not only the advancement in science and the impact that that will have, but also the jobs that you created during Covid, keeping a team together during Covid. I’m curious about what stands out as most meaningful, or what you’re most proud of when you reflect back on your journey with DJS Antibodies.

DL: Yes, well, definitely – this is probably a bit cliched – but I think the team thing is huge. I think, through Covid, everyone around the world was just feeling their way through, trying to figure out how to respond to that. I think, at the beginning of the company, we were doing it, as I said, because we liked science and it was a way of doing that, and that was always-, in my mind, the day that you are not enjoying what you’re doing, this is not worth it. Like, you can look at it and say ‘Oh, you started a company, it sold, you made money. Oh, how great is that.’ As disingenuous as it can sound in hindsight, I really think that money was never the motivation. For the first two years, we didn’t pay ourselves. It was all because we just really enjoyed doing it. And so, I do think that was the motivation, and then that evolved into, ‘Hey, we could do science that has an impact.’ Like, ‘If this works, we’re going to get it out into the world and it could actually help patients.’  

So, that, then, might not have been there at the start, but became a second layer of ‘Hey, this is why we did this thing.’ So, for my role – when I take a plane somewhere and I have to fill out a form, I still write my occupation as ‘Scientist’ –I became the CEO, and so, focused more on the business side and operational side, and Joe more on the scientific side, and so, began thinking a lot about how do you build a team? How do you keep them motivated? How do you make sure you can pay their salaries with as much security is possible? How do you form a culture that is really positive for them to come to work, so they enjoy it as well as doing good stuff? 

JBG: Yes. 

DL: And so, I think, there are lots of things. For me, I guess, I struggle to go past being proud of the science we did. I think that was really good. But there were some pretty big headwinds against some of the things we did, internally, and I’m really proud that we did those. So, we set up a very clear progression and promotional framework, where salary bands were published so, everyone knew what pay bands were, everyone knew exactly what you had to achieve to move from research assistant or research associate to scientist or senior scientist. So, we tried to make it very clear, very democratic-, not democratic, but meritocratic-, I’ve lost my words. Yes, but, basically, people knew what they were doing and how to progress.  

We did things like, we established a parental leave policy, which nobody liked, because I was pretty aggressive on making sure that both mothers and fathers had equal rights, and in fact, in some cases, both were forced to take leave, so, there was no ability to say – not that anyone does this, but subliminally, they probably do –‘Oh, a woman in this age category, oh, do we need to factor in that they might go off on maternity leave?’ I wanted to make sure that if we were hiring a man, exactly the same considerations were there. So, we had this policy which meant that it was very good, so, people had lots of leave, but also, people had to take some leave. So, there was no way of saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to hire this person because we think they’ll take less leave.’ Even though you hope that never happens, I think society shows that that sort of stuff does.  

So, there was that. Sorry, this is a long story, but we also had a-, probably, actually, the thing I’m most proud of on the team side is, we established a policy where all the team got a share in the company. And so, when the company was sold, Joe and I got the great privilege of sitting with everyone, one by one, and saying, ‘We’ve sold the company for this much, and you are going to walk away with this much.’  

JBG: Wow. 

DL: And for some of those people, for a number of them, that was as life-changing amount, and they deserved every penny of it. They worked super hard, they did the science, and, you know, that’s maybe not so atypical in some companies, but what was atypical was, the most junior person in the company shared it as well as the most senior person, whereas often, these things would be focused more on senior people. And also, no matter what happened in the company, the amount that was given to the employees was protected. So, Joe and I had founding shares. If we took on more and more investment, our shares get diluted and diluted and diluted into smaller and smaller percentages. The team’s pot was not subject to that. So, we could have taken on a billion dollars’ worth of investment, our founder shares could have been .0001%, but the employees still had this protected pool. So, that meant, if the company ever sold – we didn’t know if it would happen, but if it did – they would be the beneficiaries of that. And so, there were a lot of conversations with investors [1:00:00] and lawyers and things. They were saying, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do this.’ I’m super proud that we stuck to it, pushed it through, because, in the end, we were one of the lucky ones that got to sell the company and seeing that come back to all the employees was pretty special. 

JBG: Wow. And that is an uncommon model, I would imagine. Were your employees surprised to learn about that? 

DL: Yes, I think so. So, giving employees some kind of share, or options on things, is not so uncommon, but I think the way we did it, it was very uncommon, and it was done so that everyone could share in it, rather than just senior people, and so that, no matter what happened to the company, whether it went really well, or went just okay, or not so well, they would have this protected pot. So, I think that was uncommon. I think the interesting thing, which is maybe different from the US, where there’s this quite a commercial, start-upey mindset, in Britain, that’s not the case. Convincing someone to work in start-up versus working in a big company or academia is actually really hard to do, and so, a lot of people were, well we were, like, ‘Oh, we’re going to give you this stake in the company, and they were, like. ‘Oh, yeah, okay, cool. I don’t really know what that means.’ And so, we did a lot of education where we’d try and say ‘This is what it means and this is how it plays out.’ But I think, for some of them-, some of them were pretty savvy about it, but for some of them, it was in that room, saying, ‘Here’s the number that is going to be transferred to you tomorrow,’ where they were, just, like, ‘Wait, how? What? How did that happen?’ 

JBG: Yes. 

DL: So, yes, I think there were probably varied levels of understanding of why that was being set up, but then, at the end of it, everyone was happy, and I hope all those people, if they ever choose to work for another small company, they’ll really fight for their rights to have a similar kind of scheme. 

JBG: Yes. That’s really beautiful. So, that was October 2022, and we are just over two years since then. 

DL: Yes. 

JBG: I was wondering if you would mind sharing what your journey has been like since then. 

DL: Yes. So for the first year, well, from October 2022 to the end of 2023 - AbbVie is a Midwest US pharma company that bought DJS Antibodies -, part of the sale, was  - they wanted the things we’d developed - but also, we could establish AbbVie’s first R&D site in the UK, and being in Oxford is a great place to be, because we can collaborate with amazing academics and there’s an amazing, growing start-up ecosystem here, so ‘Let’s do that and bring that and support the process.’ So, for the first 15 months or so, I stayed and worked with AbbVie. We got to run the DJS team pretty independently, so, we kept pushing the research we were doing and the team is still doing, I think, really cool, awesome stuff there, but we also got to start going around and talking to academics and saying, ‘Look, hey, we’re now part of AbbVie, they’re a big company, they’re coming into town and this is the stuff that we could do where we can utilise some of their capabilities with some of the scientific brilliance here to help accelerate development of things or research in different areas.’ So, that’s what we were trying to do, and continue to.  

At the end of 2023, I got to the stage where I thought it was time for me to step away. On reflection, I think partly, that was being pretty burnt out, but partly also, as we had naturally done, Joe was really leading the science. When it was a small company, in the last couple of years at least, I was leading the business and the acquisition and all of this stuff. When you become part of a big company, that role is not as relevant. And so, Joe was doing a brilliant job leading all the science. A lot of the interactions with AbbVie, I was doing, but Joe was starting to do more. So, anyway, it was the right time for me to leave, and then-, so, for this year, I have been unemployed, which is wonderful, and I love it. I’ve had an amazing opportunity to travel a bit. I got married. 

JBG: Congratulations! 

DL: And somehow, luckily, convinced my partner, Liv, to take a couple of months after that, so, we got to travel together for a couple of months. So, right, now, I’m, I have to say, enjoying not doing very much, but-  I talk to people who are retired, and they’re, like, ‘Oh, I’m so busy,’ and you’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ Turns out, you can fill your days with a whole bunch of random crap, and I have somehow managed to do that. But it’s through  getting to explore things that you maybe didn’t have - It’s, like, an amazingly privileged position to be able to take some time off work, not have a huge financial pressure to work immediately, and ask the question, ‘What do I want to do?’ And suddenly, that is, like, existential crisis, here we come, right? Because it’s, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, I have no idea.’  

But for me, I think a bit about-, the obvious thing would be to go back into the medical science, biotech-type sphere. That’s a place I know. But I think my heart, in many ways, is with the ecology, running through the grass catching birds and frogs and snakes and things, and so is there something in the environmental world or the sustainability world that I could do that would be interesting, that I could be vaguely helpful in? And so, there are sorts of things that-, it’s just such a privilege to have a bit of freedom to explore some of those ideas. So, again, I’m learning from first principles, going out and speaking to people around Oxford or further afield and saying ‘So, what is happening in this space now?’ But yes, it’s like being at uni all over again, learning something which is phenomenal.  

The other thing is having a bit of time here in Oxford, I’m doing all the things that I, wish I had done as a student. So, as a scientist, I spent all my time up in the lab doing stuff, never went to any of the libraries. So, now, sometimes I take my laptop and head up to Duke Humfrey’s Library or something, and just sit there, kind of pretending to work, but mainly just looking at how beautiful it is. But, going and seeing those kinds of places or going and seeing museums around town or in London are things that have been on the bucket list, I always wanted to do but have never done. Suddenly, you’ve got a bit of time to do those. 

JBG: That’s wonderful. 

DL: Yes. I mean, it’s very indulgent and such a lucky position to be in, but I’m also extremely grateful. I think the flip side is, to be honest, for most of the year – it’s almost ten months of not working –for the first six to nine months of that, even the thought of working would almost give me anxiety. So, I’m not the sort of person who thinks about being burnt out or whatever. That’s probably a bit of a weakness, because in hindsight, I think I really was, and I’ve spent a fair bit of time, especially at the beginning of the year, just sleeping and really trying to take it easy and recoup. So, again, not everyone gets the opportunity to take some time to recover, so, I’m hyper grateful to be in that position, but, in hindsight that’s been really important. I, without realising, was pretty exhausted by the time I stepped away. 

JBG: Would you mind sharing, Dave, a little bit about Beyond Equality, which I believe you also founded, is that right? 

DL: Well, with a group, yes.  

JBG: Yes. But much earlier, right? 

DL: Yes. So, I should know exactly when that was, but yes, I think 2012 or 2013. Actually, largely a group from the Rhodes community got together, and, to be honest, it probably all started with a guy named Dan Guinness (Australia-at-Large & Keble 2008), who is another Australian Rhodes Scholar, who was here, played on the rugby team, had been a professional rugby player, was doing a PhD in anthropology, was looking at masculinity in boys and especially how identity is affected when they’re displaced from where they grew up. And so, because he had been both in the sports scene here but also thinking a lot about [1:10:00] masculinity in boys and men and how they respond to things-, the university was setting up a sexual consent workshop that they wanted to roll out with students, and so, he got involved with that and was working with the team on that, and they asked him ‘What do you think about this?’ and he said, ‘You know, this is great, 100% necessary, but none of my mates would come to this.’  

And so, he and a few others of us had a beer at the King’s Arms here one day and said ‘Is there something we could do to have this super important conversation about gender equality, sexual consent, with guys, with guys who don’t think feminism is their problem, or, you know, “I’m not an abusive guy, so, I don’t need to think about this”.’ It’s just, like not on their radar. How do you bring those men into this conversation and help them both identify their own norms and cultures, but also be good allies for everyone. And so, that was really the beginning, and we thought, ‘Okay, well, these guys are doing a sexual consent workshop, so, let’s try and design some sort of workshop.’ We put some really crappy slides together and got a bunch of our mates together in a room and presented this workshop and said, ‘Give us some feedback,’ and they tore it to shreds and were, like, ‘This was terrible, this was terrible.’  

But then we, over time, iterated and iterated, and it became a programme that-, initially we were running workshops, all-male workshops, so all the participants were men, across teams in the university here in Oxford. So, mainly sports teams, was what we focused on, and it was getting them to have conversations about positive masculinity, and specifically just trying to get them to define their own cultures. We weren’t trying to say anything is right or anything is wrong. Obviously there were certain red lines that if they went over, we’d say, ‘Okay, we can’t go there,’ but otherwise, we believe that almost all men are good men and want to be good men. They don’t always do good things, but it’s often because you don’t talk about it or don’t speak to your friends. You get to this race to the lowest common denominator when you’re with your mates, so, let’s get those groups into a room and talk about, ‘Hey, what do you value? And what do you value?’ And you find, all of a sudden, people saying ‘Oh, I was wolf whistling at that girl because I thought you thought it was funny, or you thought it was cool, but actually, you don’t value that at all. In fact, it’s totally against-,’ and so, suddenly, you see these pennies drop in a room full of guys being, like, ‘Hey, we could just be ourselves, and be the good guys that we are. We could still have a huge amount of fun, but do that in slightly different ways, and suddenly we’re being way more positive members of our community.’  

And, I mean, maybe to take a step back, for me, I was really excited to get involved, because I’d had that same experience. I’d gone to a residential college in Sydney where-, Sydney University has something like 30,000 students, and1500 go to a residential college, so, it’s a very small minority. Most people live at home or live in a share flat in the city. But this college community, to be honest, is a pretty elitist place. I went along because I was, like, ‘I’ve got to live somewhere. I’m moving four hours from the country to Sydney.’ I was, like ‘Cool, this college, someone said this had good food,’ so, I chose that one. But, it was an all-boys college. It was the only all-boys college, I think, maybe in Australia at the time, and I actually had a great time and formed some of my best friends for life from there.  

But on reflection, I was also involved in group things that I wouldn’t say were necessarily horrific, but they were definitely not in my value set. Like, you’d sit around singing songs together that objectified women or things like this, which felt all very ‘Yes,’ and bravado at the time, but as soon as I was stepping out of that and being given the space to think about that, I was, like, ‘What? Why was I there? Why was I doing that? I don’t value any of those things.’ And people like Dan and the Beyond Equality group here were instrumental for me in having that self-realisation, that self-reflection, and so, I was super motivated to help in any way for others to do that. So, that’s what we did. Now a few years into it, we joined or merged with another charity that was doing similar stuff, but in schools in London, and since then, it’s grown even further. So, we run this kind of work across universities, across more than 100, maybe 200, schools in the UK. 

JBG: Wow. 

DL: Across corporate workplaces. We work with the premier league and other sports teams. And it’s all focused on getting men and boys, or people who identify as men, into the conversation about gender and how they see masculinity and how they can be positive members of their community. Again, them defining these things. We’re not saying, ‘To be a good man, you have to do this or this.’ Everyone has got their own version of masculinity and their own context and their own community, but, have those conversations, take that first step. 

JBG: Yes. 

DL: And we’re a tiny part-, there’s loads of work that women have done. For ages, they’ve done amazing work, and so, we’re just trying to be one little part that can hopefully support that huge movement. 

JBG: Great.

DL: But yes, so, now Dan still runs this organisation – so, that’s his full-time job – and is doing a phenomenal job with a broader team, and I feel very lucky to be able to have been part of the story, but also, I sit on the board of trustees, so, I get to hopefully help out when I can. I hope I’m more a help then a hindrance, but yes, I think it is an organisation doing really phenomenal work. 

JBG: Wonderful. Well, I was wondering if I could ask you to reflect, Dave. So, you have these incredible accomplishments behind you professionally, and are now at an exciting moment where you are thinking about what is next, and I was curious if you would mind reflecting on what you would say motivates and inspires you at this stage of your life and career. 

DL: Yes. Okay. That’s a good question. Maybe, like lots of people in the world, the thing I am thinking about an awful lot at the moment is sustainability. I’d say, any of my friends who bother to read this or take the time to look at this will say I’ve given you a very tampered response, but I’m reasonably pessimistic about humanity’s ability to do what’s good for them. And so, I’m really interested in ways that we can utilise established incentive structures to get humanity to move towards sustainability. And again, from my interest in the biological sphere, I’m really interested in biodiversity and how we can protect that, but I think, maybe, working in a little company, I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid a little bit on just the power of the system and capitalism and all those things, and while I wouldn’t necessarily throw my hand up to being a flag-flying, hardcore capitalist, I do think that that’s the reality of the world.  

So, are there ways that we can utilise incentives that are aligned with that to get people to value biodiversity, or renewable energies, or whatever these things are. So, I don’t know, is the inspiration fear? Fear that, if we don’t, it’s going to not be such a nice future? I don’t know, but I think the thing that’s motivating me is, I feel that we’re on a trajectory, an inevitable trajectory, that is not a positive one, and I’m very happy to have more optimistic people tell me that that’s wrong, but I also feel like there is an opportunity to start to push that path in more sustainable and positive ways. And, look, early days. I’m exploring lots of things [1:20:00] that just interest me, which is an amazing thing to get to do, but I think possibly something in that space, and if I could be part of, or if someone else can be part of, something that helps to turn the oil tanker that is humanity towards things that mean that, for generations to come, people will live good, fulfilled, happy lives, that would be pretty awesome. For me, there’s probably a slight biology bent to that question, but yes, the opportunity to just play a tiny role in that is pretty motivating. 

JBG: Yes.  

DL: I say, as an unemployed person, sitting here doing nothing. So, you know, you have to take that with a grain of salt. 

JBG: Well, I would love to ask you, as we reach the latter part of our conversation, a few questions related to the Scholarship. 

DL: Yes, yes. 

JBG: So, the first being, what impact would you say that the Rhodes Scholarship had on your life? 

DL: Well, I guess it’s been massive, but that can come in many ways. Like, I’m, sort of, a believer in, you’re a product of the path you take, and so, had I not come here, I would have been another path, and I have no idea what that would have looked like, and so, in that respect, the Rhodes is 100% essential to where I am today. But I think, to be more tangible about it, I came here in 2010 to do a PhD and I was, like, ‘Okay, in three years, I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll head to the US or back to Australia, or whatever it might be,’ and, what, 14 years later, I’m still here. I’m one of those people who’s never left Oxford. So, I have friends come back through town who are, like, ‘You’re still here?’ like, ‘I’ve lived in five cities since then.’  

So, in one respect, coming back to the question, this, in part, is home, at least for now, which would never have happened without Rhodes. Certainly the opportunity to start DJS and do all of that wouldn’t have happened without being here in Oxford. But I think for me, the thing-, I do try and think of ‘Who was I when I came here as a 22-, 23-year-old, and what did that person believe and think about the world?’ That’s a really difficult thing to, pin down and remember, but I am sure it is extremely different to who I am today. So, being here-, and I do attribute that a lot to the Rhodes community and the things I was talking about before, about being here and hearing talks and interacting with other people doing other degrees, learning from them and their perspectives and what they believe, based on how they grew up, has fundamentally changed my understanding of the world and what people think and what people value and what one should value or shouldn’t value, and I’m forever grateful for that.  

I think as someone who, as I said before, loves learning things, I guess it’s just such an amazing thing to get to learn from all of these people, not in the formal academic setting, but learn that someone from this part of the world with this background thinks in this way - Oh, wow. I guess, when I came here, I was a person who’d lived in Australia and I’d left once or twice, but that’s all. So  now, I think of all the people I’ve learned from and got to know all around the world and all of their perspectives that have stayed with me. It’s just so much richer than anything I was able to have previously. 

JBG: Beautiful. We celebrated the 120th anniversary of the Scholarships last summer. 

DL: Yes. 

JBG: So, a great opportunity to reflect on the history of the Scholarships, which is one of our hopes for this project, but also a really natural time to look ahead to the next chapter of the Rhodes Scholarship, and so, I’d be curious to know what your hopes for the future of the Rhodes Scholarship would be. 

DL: Okay. I do think it is amazing-, as with lots of scholarships, but it is an amazing opportunity for people to come and explore themselves, their own ideas, other people’s ideas, and I think that is the greatest richness of it. So, I think it could look like lots of different things. If it holds that kernel of, we’re bringing people together with open minds – or not so open minds – but they’re going to come and they’re going to mix and they’re going to learn, I think that’s hugely rich. I do think-, I don’t think any of these things need to be formal, but an ability to help and catalyse cross-disciplinary conversations and mixing is really wonderful. I think the Scholarship is probably doing a great job at this, I don’t really know, but finding people who don’t necessarily come through the most typical routes. Like, they didn’t go to the best school and they didn’t go to the top university. I think those things we can use as surrogates for success, which don’t always actually correlate with that.  

So, ensuring that Rhodes, as a community, continues to be true to itself in trying to find people that are impressive and inspirational in all the different meanings of those words, in all the different contexts, and not falling into a single definition of that, I think would be good. But I think the thing that Rhodes can do – at least it did for me – that I haven’t seen any other programme be able to do is have a physical space that they can bring people together who wouldn’t otherwise meet each other, talk, mix, learn. That is really, I think, I believe, the power of the Scholarship and something that is incredibly special. 

JBG: Thank you. And lastly, I’d love to ask if you have any advice or words of wisdom for today’s Rhodes Scholars. 

DL: I don’t know, people give advice when they just want the same advice mirrored back at them, so-, I guess the thing that I would say is be yourself, don’t worry about having a plan. I remember another Rhodes Scholar coming here and saying to me that the piece of advice he got from someone after he got the Scholarship was ‘Go and do something that you would never do otherwise,’ like, you would never have done. And so, this guy joined the improvised comedy group. He had never done anything like that, but loved it, and I do think there is a little bit of that leaning in. For me, my experience was particularly rich, and I stayed maybe too long, but stayed because I leaned into life here and enjoyed it. I think some people come, and they have their own reason, they’re, like, ‘Fine, I’m going to come, stay for one or two years, then I’m going to get out of here. I’ve got everything planned.’ I think, for some people that works, but for some, it really limits their opportunity to really say ‘Hey, I’m here with open doors. Let’s see what happens.’  

So, yes, I’d say, be open to it, but then I think, for people who are thinking about Rhodes or maybe thinking about applying, it’s really about being yourself. You are your best advocate, and you’re wonderful in so many individual ways, and the thing I was so, just blown away by when I first arrived here -  I guess, I had seen, in Australia, the conversation about Rhodes and it was all a bunch of extremely ambitious people who had been thinking about Rhodes for a long time and knew what they had to do. And I was bit worried that when I would get here, it would be a room full of [1:30:00] people like that, and the opposite could not have been more true. Everyone here is amazingly impressive and so, yes, you have all the imposter syndrome and all of that, but everyone that I met was just really genuine, they were themselves, they were impressive in their own way, but they weren’t pretending to be impressive, or I didn’t think they were, in a way that was not authentically themselves. So, I found the community so wonderful, because they’re just a bunch of great, nice, people, who are, like, ‘Hey, I’m a bit weird in this way, but I like doing this,’ and ‘I’m good at this, but I’m terrible at that,’ and I think that’s important. And so, I think, for people who are thinking about this, either have just started or are thinking about in the future, ‘Try to be true to yourself,’ I hope is a good strategy, and hopefully one that brings you happiness and fulfilment. 

JBG: Lovely. Well, Dave, we are so grateful for your participation, and I would love to ask if there is anything else that you would like to share before we close. 

DL: I don’t think so. I’m extremely grateful to have the opportunity to share this. It’s not often you get someone to just listen to you spout random stuff for a period of time. 

JBG: Well, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much, and I will end our recording there.  

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