Dame Alison as worthy as anyone

Otago Daily Times

4 days ago

Arable industry leader Alison Stewart had a classic case of imposter syndrome when she received a damehood.
Dame Alison admitted she felt undeserving over King's Birthday weekend until her partner told her she was just as worthy a recipient as any of the select group of talented women to hold the same honour.
"You look at all of these amazing people who have been given this honour and think what on earth am I doing in the same space as them? I suppose sports people look at other people like politicians and scientists and think the same. You always tend to think people excelling in a certain area must be better than you. I've just decided to accept that everybody's really good, otherwise you end up with a serious inferiority complex and don't enjoy the honour."
Emeritus Distinguished Professor Stewart was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to plant science and the arable sector in the King's Birthday Honours.
In terms of damehoods, this is just a tier below a select group of women, including former prime minister Jacinda Ardern, who have been made a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Dame Alison is stepping down from her role of the past seven years as chief executive of the Foundation for Arable Research (FAR).
She has been inundated with calls from wellwishers and plant science industry people from around the world.
"If you have been in the system for 40 years you end up reconnecting with people you've worked with 20 to 30 years ago just to say hello and congratulations. It's like a trip down memory lane. Plant science rarely gets recognised at that kind of level and so there are all these plant scientists out there around the world who just think this is wonderful and it's like that too for the arable sector."
She was happy to accept the honour as it raised the profile of both sectors and honoured the people inside them.
"It has to be like that because in the type of job and the career I've had I've never worked in isolation and I've always been working fortunately with really good people, whether it was a university environment, a commercial company or FAR. You can't look at it in isolation because my success has been their success."
Dame Alison only wished her late mother and father were alive to see her honoured.
Born just outside of Glasgow, her parents were always in the garden propagating plants and trimming rose bushes, exposing her to a love of plants.
Her father was a fine instrument engineer repairing mechanical microscopes which got her interested in micro-biology, while her initially stay-at-home mother was a creative woman into flower arrangement, calligraphy and gardening.
"My brother was the chartered accountant who's retired back in Scotland so both of us had professional careers. My parents both left school when they were 14 and they basically sacrificed a huge amount to allow my brother and I an opportunity to get a higher education. It's just a shame my parents are no longer alive because they would absolutely love that I have been recognised in this way."
At school she was inspired by a biology teacher to choose plant science and when she went to university lecturers instilled this interest in her further.
After earning a PhD in plant pathology at the University of Stirling, just north of Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the early 1980s, she became the first female professor at Lincoln University in 1998.
She said it was nice to have students later come up to her to say they were inspired by her lectures, just as she had been inspired earlier by her teachers.
Other accolades were earning excellence in research awards and becoming the founding director of the Bio-Protection Research Centre at the university from 2003 to 2011 and a distinguished professor of plant pathology.
She was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in recognition of services to biology in 2009.
The transition to becoming an executive in applied research after being in a university environment for so long was to find a new challenge, she said.
On leaving the university world, she was head of the R&D unit at Marrone Bio Innovations in California in 2013, then became the general manager of forest science at Scion before accepting the chief executive role at FAR in 2018.
She said going to a commercial company in the United States had been rewarding and encouraged her to deliver meaningful research to an industry in innovative ways to "time-poor" growers.
She plans to spend a semi-retirement in science advisory or governance roles as well as building a new house in Governor's Bay and probably pursuing photography and landscape gardening hobbies.
"That's what I've enjoyed about my career — I've been in academia, the commercial environment, in industry, linked in with government agencies and worked in all of the plant sector starting off in vegetables, then horticulture, forestry and a bit of pastoral work and now arable so it's been very broad-ranging. I've always liked governance and you get better with age because as much as you can go to governance workshops a lot of it is based on experience and having been around the block and learned from mistakes I feel that's how I can contribute now."
Apart from the odd formal occasion, she would prefer to be called by her first name.
"I don't think you will ever be hearing me introducing myself as Dame Alison. I've always just been Alison and don't tend to defer to people based on their title and don't expect people to do that with me."
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