Dementia Researcher Blogs

Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

PhD life can shrink to the size of a lab bench. In this blog Beccy describes two experiences that took her well beyond it. The first was a week of kayaking, climbing and gorge walking in the Lake District with her doctoral training partnership. The second was a day explaining her research to Formula 1 fans while volunteering for Race Against Dementia at Silverstone. Between them, they changed how she thinks about teamwork, collaboration and communicating science. She makes the case that difference is what makes a team work, and that a PhD might be an individual qualification, but science is a team sport.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-beyond-the-lab-bubble-phd-teamwork/

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Beccy Owen is a PhD Researcher at the University of Warwick, exploring how tau pathology disrupts neuronal ion channels and brain network activity in Alzheimer’s disease. As part of the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Programme, her work uses electrophysiology to better understand the molecular drivers of neurodegeneration. Originally from the Welsh countryside, Beccy’s passion for dementia research was shaped during her postgraduate studies and through personal experience with a family member living with the condition. She will be sharing her journey, insights, and lessons learned throughout her PhD here on the blog.

Find Becky on LinkedIn

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

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Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher.

An epidemiologist who still plays amateur rugby takes a hard look at the evidence linking the sport to dementia. Connor, sets the Scottish study of former internationals against a much larger New Zealand cohort and asks why their results differ so widely. The answer runs through how dementia gets recorded, why fit athletes live long enough to be diagnosed, and the difference between relative and absolute risk. He closes with what the research does and does not say about club players, and which changes to the game are worth making regardless.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-does-rugby-cause-dementia/

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Dr Connor Richardson is a Neuro-epidemiology Research Associate at The University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on using advanced statistical modelling and machine learning to measure dementia risk. Connor blogs about his research, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, and sometimes his Pomapoo’s.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

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Bernie McInally narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher.

A panda study that leaves out every panda in a zoo would be laughed out of peer review. Yet for years dementia research has done something very similar with care homes, where a large share of people living with dementia actually live.

This blog looks at the warnings new researchers hear before they ever walk through a care home door: recruitment, ethics, capacity, busy staff, worried families. It asks whether those are reasons to stay away or simply parts of the job to plan for. Expect tea, reminiscence, a fair amount of custard, and a case for getting early career researchers into care homes rather than talking them out of it.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-pandas-dementia-and-why-we-need-to-reach-early-career-researchers/

Bernie McInally is a Clinical Studies Officer at NHS Lothian and the Neuroprogressive and Dementia Network. Bernie's background is in Nursing, working in Mental Health and with Older People. He retired from full time NHS clinical work, and is now back working in Clinical Research supporting delivery of the Enabling Research in Care Homes (ENRICH) Scotland. He is passionate about research delivery, and opening access to people in all communities.

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Dr Chloe Fawns-Ritchie narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

What happens when the health conditions you study for a living arrive in your own family?

Chloe, researches why people age differently, and here she tells the story of her mum's dementia, diagnosed at 61. A heart attack followed, and then a late-found, advanced bowel cancer. The diagnosis took 18 months. Along the way came a screening test scored above the cut-off because it was administered wrongly.

Later, dementia care and cancer care rarely seemed to speak to each other. The account shows how multimorbidity plays out in real care, and why people with dementia so often have cancer found late. It also covers what it means that drug trials routinely leave out people like her mum. Then it turns to the carer's side and the academic's side. Expertise turned out to offer little protection, and work was no use as a distraction. Productivity slipped, and grief now shows up in the data.

It ends with a gentle death and a slow return to a job she once loved.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-when-your-research-becomes-your-reality/

Author

Dr Chloe Fawns-Ritchie is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores how cognitive function and health influence each other across the lifespan, why people experience different rates of cognitive decline, and what this means for everyday life. She specialises in cognitive assessment, with particular interests in cognitive ageing, chronic pain and the effects of medication on cognition.

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Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

UKRI is changing how it assesses grants. The plans include fewer and longer awards, distributed peer review, triage by institutions before bids reach the funder, interviews for some awards, and a trial of AI-assisted assessment.

In this blog Yvonne, weighs up what that means for researchers. Longer grants could bring real stability and more ambitious science. But the researchers caught between early-career schemes and programme grants may find the door narrower than ever. Drawing on Claartje Vinkenburg's work on "selling science", Yvonne argues that every assessment method selects for something: writing skill, institutional status or confidence. The real question is how closely any of them tracks the ability to do excellent research.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-ukri-grant-assessment-changes/

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Dr Yvonne Couch is an Associate Professor of Neuroimmunology at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. Her passion for problem-solving and love of science drive her to advance our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different career topics in her monthly blogs - she does a great job of narrating, too.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

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Emily Spencer narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Plenty of PhD students would say writing is the part they dread most, and Emily said exactly that at her PhD interview. With submission now in sight, she describes how the thing she feared became the part of the job she enjoys most. Perfectionism, an inner critic with firm opinions and the pull of everything else competing for headspace all play a part. So does the unexpected help that came from returning after maternity leave with far less time to spare. She wrote it in the final hour of a residential writing retreat in North Yorkshire, and it makes a case for why getting away from the desk can pay for itself.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/learning-to-love-academic-writing/

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Emily Spencer is a PhD Student at University College London, looking at improving how GPs communicate with people with dementia and their family carers about their future care. Emily previously had a 5-year career break to pursue a career as a musician, and has previously undertaken research on improving the care people with dementia receive from their GP practice, as well as end-of-life and palliative care provision in the community. Emily is also a new mum and will be writing about her experiences navigating motherhood and a research career.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

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Dr Clíona Farrell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

In 1986 Carol Jennings, a teacher from Coventry, answered an appeal in the Alzheimer's Society newsletter with a letter and a hand-drawn family tree. Her family went on to reveal the London mutation in the APP gene, and forty years of Alzheimer's research grew from it, reaching the first disease-modifying treatments shortly before Carol's own death from the disease in 2024.

In this blog Clíona, reports from a UCL200 screening of the BBC documentary The Jennings vs Alzheimer's and the panel that followed. The panel was Stuart Jennings, Prof Catherine Mummery, Prof Nick Fox and Dr Richard Oakley of Alzheimer's Society. The audience wanted to know how anyone can stay hopeful when today's drugs do so little, and the answer came back that this is the start, not the end. From there the discussion turned to what is holding the field back. Diagnosis and post-diagnostic support are underfunded, and stigma still keeps people away from their GP. Researchers are too often poor at explaining their own progress, and dementia sits a long way behind cancer on public health effort. It closes with Carol's habit of asking not why, but what, and her husband's call for everyone to keep putting that question to the people with power to act.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-forty-years-of-dementia-progress-carol-jennings/

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Dr Clíona Farrell is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the UK Dementia Research Institute at University College London. Her work focuses on understanding neuroinflammation in Down syndrome, both prior to, and in response to, Alzheimer’s disease pathology. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, Clíona completed her undergraduate degree in Neuroscience in Trinity College, and then worked as a research assistant in the Royal College of Surgeons studying ALS and Parkinson’s disease. She also knows the secret behind scooping the perfect 99 ice-cream cone.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers, drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, who we thank for their ongoing support.

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Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Every good lab trains people who then leave it, and in this blog Becky writes about what that costs the person left behind.

The first half is practical: why no one is truly irreplaceable, how record keeping and an electronic lab notebook keep critical knowledge out of a single person's head, and why an offboarding protocol has to start months before the last afternoon.

The second half is about the part of the job nobody puts in the induction pack. By the time you are a PI you are the one who stays while everyone else rotates past, and in a funding climate where good people leave because the money ran out rather than because they wanted to, the loss arrives mixed up with guilt. Becky writes openly about her own recent departure, the meeting where she could not hold it together, and what pulled her out of it: a network of peers who are not going anywhere, treating mobility as something that genuinely serves the researcher, and measuring your own success by what your people go on to do once they are gone.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-when-a-postdoc-leaves-your-lab/

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Dr Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer's Research UK Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and has previously worked in the USA. Becky writes about her experiences of starting up a research lab and progressing into a more senior research role. Becky's research uses mass spectrometry to quantify thousands of proteins in the brains and biofluids of people with dementia. Her lab is working on various projects, including work to compare brain tissue from people with dementia from Alzheimer’s Disease to tissue from people who have similar levels of Alzheimer’s Disease pathology but no memory problems. Becky is also a mum; she runs, drinks herbal teas and reads lots of books.

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

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Beccy Owne narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Beccy, a PhD student at the University of Warwick studying how tau disrupts ion channels in Alzheimer's disease, is nearly halfway through her PhD and looks back at what it has taught her away from the bench. She explains why research runs on a much longer clock than undergraduate or master's projects, why not knowing the answer is the whole point, and how a flash talk given two weeks into her studies changed how she handles new challenges in and out of the lab. She also covers keeping work and home separate, learning by doing, teaching in the lab, and treating failed experiments as a normal part of science. A good listen for anyone in the early years of a PhD, or anyone wondering if they're on track.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-10-things-my-phd-has-taught-me-so-far/

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Beccy Owen is a PhD Researcher at the University of Warwick, exploring how tau pathology disrupts neuronal ion channels and brain network activity in Alzheimer’s disease. As part of the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Programme, her work uses electrophysiology to better understand the molecular drivers of neurodegeneration. Originally from the Welsh countryside, Beccy’s passion for dementia research was shaped during her postgraduate studies and through personal experience with a family member living with the condition. She will be sharing her journey, insights, and lessons learned throughout her PhD here on the blog.

Find Becky on LinkedIn

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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers; drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, whom we thank for their ongoing support.

--

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Jacqui Kerr narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Jacqui manages a research network. Most days that means teams, partnerships and delivery pathways. Then she drove north to a memory café in a rural Scottish town, sat down with a cuppa, and found herself back in the job she trained for in 2000. She had come to talk about research opportunities. What she got instead was a roomful of people asking how to take part, what would be expected of them, and whether living miles from a study site would count them out. Nobody was put off. She writes about what that afternoon put back into the work.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-returning-to-my-roots-visiting-a-memory-cafe/

Jacqueline Kerr is the Network Manager for the Neuroprogressive and Dementia Network in Scotland. With a background in research management and public engagement, she is dedicated to supporting clinical trials and improving access to research across the country. Jacqueline works closely with clinicians, researchers, and the public to raise awareness of dementia studies and encourage participation.

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