Winners' Stories: When Curiosity and Practicality Intertwine

The Essential Balance

For Brett Mellies, the force pulling his academic and personal interests together isn’t just curiosity or intellect –  it’s taking opportunities to get practical.

“I really like engineering,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of time building stuff on our farm. I do welding and cutting and grinding… I just really, really like building stuff. So I guess that’s why I like engineering.” While his intellectual curiosity ranges from speculative genetics to the future of historical study, what binds Brett’s interests together and distinguishes him as an academic is his instinct to turn ideas into practice.

A Competition That Fit

That urge to bridge thinking and doing is what drew him to the Future Problem Solving (FPS) competition. “I found out of the scholarship a couple of months ago, so that really got me excited to go and win the competition.”

His entry was, fittingly, as imaginative as it was grounded: “My winning solution on storing historical data was inspired by extremophile bacteria: bacteria that’s going to be around for a really long time.” Inspiration came from his research: “They’ve found bacteria in permafrost that’s been alive for millions of years. That kind of got me thinking of something that could survive pretty much as long as humans do and store data for a long time”.

But Brett didn’t enter FPS just for the science. “It really allows you to brainstorm and be creative. You can pretty much come up with any idea or any solution that you want,” he reflects. “I got to explore my interest in biology, history and genetic engineering there.” For Brett, the appeal is in the free-flow between disciplines – and in seeing where bold ideas might touch the real world.

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