Uncomfortably Curious

Concussion isn’t just “getting your bell rung” — it’s a mild traumatic brain injury that disrupts how your brain’s electrical system works, often long after the obvious symptoms settle. Neurophysiologist Professor Alan Pearce has spent more than a decade using non-invasive brain stimulation to study how the brain recovers — or doesn’t — after repeated impacts in Australian Rules football, rugby an...

What does it mean that the universe is dying — slowly, quietly, running out of usable energy? How does where a galaxy grows up shape what it becomes? And how do we actually know that the gold in your wedding ring was forged in the collision of two dead stars? Associate Professor Luke Davies is an astrophysicist at the University of Western Australia, based at ICRAR (the International Centre for Ra...

You can spend years building something impressive and still wonder if it's what you actually wanted. Izzy Di Domenico is a lecturer, unit chair, and nine-year Deakin veteran whose path ran through a PhD and a stint inside elite AFL. We talk about what academic life actually involves once you're in it, the identity shift a PhD quietly produces, and what it's like to step into leadership while still...

Most new dads want to be present and involved. Many quietly become passengers in their own family — and don't realise until it's already happened. Norma Barrett is a public health researcher at Deakin University who studies the transition to fatherhood — particularly why so many men show up committed and still end up feeling peripheral, guilty, or unsure of their role. We talk about what "passenge...

Billy Griffiths, author of Deep Time Dreaming , is a historian who has spent years thinking about what it means to inhabit a continent where people have lived for at least 60,000 years — and how rarely that depth of time sits at the centre of how most Australians understand this country. This conversation covers how Australian archaeology went from a chaotic, under-resourced field to something mor...

Some conversations make you more certain. These ones don't. Uncomfortably Curious is long-form conversations with researchers and thinkers who are more interested in understanding than performing certainty. Hosted by Aidan Mill. New episodes weekly.