Dementia Researcher Blogs

Dementia Researcher
Dementia Researcher
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Science
  • Updated Daily

Dementia Researcher blogs are written and then narrated by the authors. Through this podcast channel, we share the narrations, so you can listen back where ever you get your podcasts, as well as on our website - careers, research and your science. Brought to you by www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk - everything you need, all in one place.

  1. 18h ago

    Beccy Owen - Giving Your First Seminar: What I Learned

    Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. What if the thing you've been dreading since day one of your PhD turns out to be the best week of work you do all year? A seminar isn't an exam, and the audience isn't waiting to catch you out. In this blog, Beccy talks through what actually made the difference: pulling a year of scattered experiments into one place, working out the story before opening PowerPoint, stripping the text off her slides, and practising until she was sick of the sound of her own voice. There's also a decent argument here that questions at the end are the best part. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-giving-your-first-seminar/ -- 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 -- 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. -- Leave us a Tip https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support Follow us on social media: https://www.instagram.com/dementia_researcher/ https://www.facebook.com/Dementia.Researcher/https://www.twitter.com/demrescommunityhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/dementia-researcher https://bsky.app/profile/dementiaresearcher.bsky.social Download and Register with our Community App: https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

    Beccy Owen - Giving Your First Seminar: What I Learned

  2. 2d ago

    Harriet Greene - The PhD Comfort Zone

    Harriet Greene narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Eighteen months into a PhD, everything clicks. The experiments run themselves, the walk to work has a coffee stop, and the days start blurring together. Harriet Greene knows exactly why that happens, and it worried her enough to do something about it. In this blog she talks about swapping Oxford for the University of Salamanca for three weeks, working on glioblastoma through a FENS Early-Career Training Programme internship, reading a Spanish dictionary on repeat because nobody in the lab spoke English, and building the first research collaboration that was hers rather than her supervisor's. Recorded from Barcelona, with reflections on why comfort and progress are not the same thing. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-the-phd-comfort-zone/ Harriet Greene is a PhD student at the University of Oxford researching dementia prevention, with a focus on how vascular risk factors such as hypertension affect the brain. Her project models the neurovascular unit in vitro, allowing her to explore biological mechanisms creatively and collaborate across departments and disease areas. Supported by the British Heart Foundation for research consumables, Harriet is also interested in biotech start-ups and translating lab discoveries into patient benefit. Outside academia, she is a scuba diving instructor, shell collector and lover of the sea, with a strong belief in paying kindness forward within the research community. -- 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. -- Leave us a Tip https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support Follow us on social media: https://www.instagram.com/dementia_researcher/ https://www.facebook.com/Dementia.Researcher/https://www.twitter.com/demrescommunityhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/dementia-researcher https://bsky.app/profile/dementiaresearcher.bsky.social Download and Register with our Community App: https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

    Harriet Greene - The PhD Comfort Zone

  3. Aug 13

    Dr Emma Law - GCP Training: Do We Really Need Regular Refreshers?

    Dr Emma Law narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Every two years, Emma has to sit her GCP update. Every two years she wonders whether it is actually necessary. This time she decided to find out properly, and the trail led back through the Nuremberg Code to the reason those rules exist at all. Along the way she picked up some things that had changed since her last refresher, including new terminology, a much wider definition of source data, and a list of the ways data gets compromised on a study without anyone meaning to. Whether you are a research nurse, a trial coordinator or an early career researcher wondering why the certificate keeps expiring, Emma has an answer for you. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-gcp-training-do-we-really-need-regular-refreshers/ -- Dr Emma Law is Strategic Manager for the The Neuroprogressive and Dementia Network in Scotland. Emma has 13 years experience as a Clinical Trails Network Manager and over 35 years experience as a Nurse, many of which were spent in the delivery of Clinical Research Trials. Emma completed her PhD and is passionate about giving people living with dementia and their carers access to participate in research. -- 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. -- Leave us a Tip https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support Follow us on social media: https://www.instagram.com/dementia_researcher/ https://www.facebook.com/Dementia.Researcher/https://www.twitter.com/demrescommunityhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/dementia-researcher https://bsky.app/profile/dementiaresearcher.bsky.social Download and Register with our Community App: https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

    Dr Emma Law - GCP Training: Do We Really Need Regular Refreshers?

  4. Aug 12

    Professor Frank Gunn-Moore - An Academic career, then and now

    Professor Frank Gunn-Moore narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Forty years of a research career, told through the three gambles that shaped it. Frank starts with an admission that surprises people: he is known for dementia research and holds no qualification in it. What he does have is a first year at Edinburgh covering biology, chemistry, physics and maths, a Cambridge PhD building roughly 200 plasmids from scratch with no kits, and a willingness to move fields when the opportunity looked better than the plan. Gamble one took him to Bristol to work on a neurotrophic factor receptor he knew nothing about, hired purely for his DNA skills. Gamble two was a move to Edinburgh so his wife could take her dream job, which produced the textbook findings that got him his own group at St Andrews. Gamble three arrived as an email from a physicist asking whether anyone fancied doing weird things with lasers, and turned into a twenty year run through photonics, optical gene delivery and commercial microscopes. The second half is what he would pass on: make room for the left field experiment even when the homogenising pull of AI makes it harder to justify, walk away from collaborators who open with what is in it for them, get involved in pooled national initiatives, and stop treating early career researchers as stepping stones on someone else's route up. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-an-academic-career-then-and-now/ Professor Frank Gunn-Moore is an academic and researcher in neurodegeneration and dementia research at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His group has advanced understanding of the early cellular and biochemical mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease, including links between mitochondrial and synaptic dysfunction, and has pioneered new models including the identification of Alzheimer’s-like pathology in cetaceans. His research has also identified potential therapeutic targets, novel signalling pathways such as FRMD6/Willin in the Hippo pathway, and contributed to patented optical technologies developed with industry. He has published over 150 research papers across biology, chemistry and physics, reflecting the interdisciplinary breadth of his work. Find Frank on LinkedIn Leave us a Tip https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support Follow us on social media: https://www.instagram.com/dementia_researcher/ https://www.facebook.com/Dementia.Researcher/https://www.twitter.com/demrescommunityhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/dementia-researcher https://bsky.app/profile/dementiaresearcher.bsky.social Download and Register with our Community App: https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

    Professor Frank Gunn-Moore - An Academic career, then and now

  5. Aug 10

    Dr Becky Carlyle - Building Labs Where It's Safe to Fail

    Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Failure in academia gets treated here as a structural problem before it gets treated as a personal one. The starting point is that this is one of very few careers where a run of setbacks can genuinely end the job, so the emotional weight attached to ordinary professional rejection is not a resilience deficit, it is a symptom of the environment. From there the focus shifts to what group leaders can actually do. Being open enough about small mistakes that they get discussed rather than hidden. Training junior team members properly so they can ask the questions they think are stupid. And the harder one: how you react on the day someone drops a stack of unlabelled sample plates, or damages an ultracentrifuge rotor beyond repair. Two contrasting stories cover exactly that, and the difference in lab atmosphere afterwards lasted months. Also here: the "Not Yet" board in Oxford where twenty rejections earns the team a dinner, CVs of failures, the case for the narrative CV, why putting on a brave face may be feeding burnout rates in academia, and when to hand someone to proper support rather than carrying it yourself. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-building-labs-where-its-safe-to-fail/ -- Dr Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer's Research UK Senior Research Fellow at 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. -- 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. -- Leave us a Tip https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support Follow us on social media: https://www.instagram.com/dementia_researcher/ https://www.facebook.com/Dementia.Researcher/https://www.twitter.com/demrescommunityhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/dementia-researcher https://bsky.app/profile/dementiaresearcher.bsky.social Download and Register with our Community App: https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

    Dr Becky Carlyle - Building Labs Where It's Safe to Fail

  6. Aug 6

    Emma & Sue Williams - A what? A Public Advisor Researcher? You may well ask…

    Emma Williams and Sue Williams discuss their work. Emma and Sue have a job title that stops conversations. Public Advisor Researcher. They did not know what it meant when they applied, and two years on they are still explaining it to other people, including to public advisors who now think they have gone over to the other side. Both came to it through caring, Emma for her Mam who had frontotemporal dementia, Sue for her father and later for a close friend. Now they write topic guides, recruit participants, run interviews and work on the analysis, while still being carers themselves. In this blog they set out what the role actually involves, what it costs them, and what an early career researcher can do to make a Public Advisor Researcher useful rather than decorative. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-what-is-a-public-advisor-researcher/ -- Emma Williams and Sue Williams are Public Advisor Researchers at the University of Liverpool. Both came to dementia research through their personal experiences of supporting family members living with dementia and related conditions. They now use that lived experience alongside their growing research expertise to help shape dementia research, contributing to study design, recruitment, interviews and data analysis. Their work focuses particularly on ensuring the experiences of people affected by dementia are properly represented in research and in efforts to improve dementia care. @denpru-qm.bsky.social Leave us a Tip https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support Follow us on social media: https://www.instagram.com/dementia_researcher/ https://www.facebook.com/Dementia.Researcher/https://www.twitter.com/demrescommunityhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/dementia-researcher https://bsky.app/profile/dementiaresearcher.bsky.social Download and Register with our Community App: https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

    Emma & Sue Williams - A what? A Public Advisor Researcher? You may well ask…

  7. Aug 5

    Emily Spencer - Overcoming Academic Conference Presentation Anxiety

    Emily Spencer narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. With her her viva date set and every working hour going into her thesis, Emily has also just returned to conference season for the first time since her maternity leave in 2023. At the International Psychogeriatric Association Congress in the Netherlands she gave an oral presentation on her conversation analytic study of advance care planning conversations between GPs, people with dementia, and their carers. In this blog she works through the layers of worry that came before it: pitching a niche method to a general audience, trusting the tech to play her video clips, presenting with poor eyesight that rules out speaker notes, and the dread of audience questions, all with her primary supervisor watching. What actually happened surprised her, and she explains why the experience has given her confidence for future talks and for defending her thesis. A good listen for anyone who has ever stood at a lectern convinced their work is too niche to interest anyone. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-overcoming-academic-conference-presentation-anxiety/ -- 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 previous 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. -- 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. -- Leave us a Tip https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support Follow us on social media: https://www.instagram.com/dementia_researcher/ https://www.facebook.com/Dementia.Researcher/https://www.twitter.com/demrescommunityhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/dementia-researcher https://bsky.app/profile/dementiaresearcher.bsky.social Download and Register with our Community App: https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

    Emily Spencer - Overcoming Academic Conference Presentation Anxiety

  8. Jul 31

    Adam Smith - Good Research Still Needs an Audience

    Adam Smith narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Publishing the paper is not the finish line, it is where the work of being read actually starts. Adam looks at what happens to research once it lands in a journal, why some of it gets noticed and a lot of it does not, and what researchers can do about that without turning themselves into a personal brand. There are some uncomfortable observations along the way about conference talks, LinkedIn, and the phrase "raising awareness", plus a couple of figures from Dementia Researcher's own channels that even he cannot fully explain. If you have ever wondered whether time spent talking about your work is time stolen from doing it, this one is worth ten minutes. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-good-research-still-needs-an-audience/ -- Adam Smith was born in the north, a long time ago. He wanted to write books, but ended up working in the NHS, and at the Department of Health. He is now Programme Director for Dementia Researcjer at University College London. He has led a number of initiatives to improve dementia research (including this website, Join Dementia Research & ENRICH), as well as pursuing his own research interests. In his spare time he spends most of his time drinking too much coffee and squeezing technology into his house. -- 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. -- Leave us a Tip https://dementia-researcher.captivate.fm/support Follow us on social media: https://www.instagram.com/dementia_researcher/ https://www.facebook.com/Dementia.Researcher/https://www.twitter.com/demrescommunityhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/dementia-researcher https://bsky.app/profile/dementiaresearcher.bsky.social Download and Register with our Community App: https://www.onelink.to/dementiaresearcher

    Adam Smith - Good Research Still Needs an Audience
See All (725)

Shows with Subscription Benefits

SUPPORTER PROGRAMME

More from Dementia Researcher. Subscribe today.

$0.99/mo or $9.99/yr after trial

View Subscription FAQs

About

Dementia Researcher blogs are written and then narrated by the authors. Through this podcast channel, we share the narrations, so you can listen back where ever you get your podcasts, as well as on our website - careers, research and your science. Brought to you by www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk - everything you need, all in one place.

Information

More From Dementia Researcher