Dementia Researcher Blogs

Lesley Cousland narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. When eight research requests landed on care homes at around the same time, the team at ENRICH Scotland stopped to take stock. Each study made sense on its own, so what did they add up to for a busy home? In this blog Lesley looks at that question from three sides: the researcher chasing a recruitment target, the organisation passin...

Rahul Sidhu & Prisha Sharma narrate this blog written for Dementia Researcher. What changes when you stop studying neurological disease through experiments and start seeing what it does to people’s lives? Two researchers who started in the same place and ended up on different paths put that question to each other. One is still at the bench, working on preclinical models. The other moved throug...

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 Ag...

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 liv...

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 doo...

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...

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...

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 headsp...

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 befor...

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...

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...

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 peo...

Rahul Sidhu narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Rahul is a regular Dementia Researcher blogger, usually writing about life as a PhD student and his work on heart disease and dementia. This time he goes back further, to his grandad, who lived with vascular dementia through Rahul's teenage years and died in 2019. Rahul describes the man his grandad was before dementia, a doctor who su...

Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Yvonne got pulled into an accidental group chat argument with colleagues about whether the brain's glymphatic system actually exists, and it escalated into a full blown journal club debate. In this blog she walks through the case for it: how the lymphatic system works everywhere else in the body, why the brain's tightly packed vasc...

Dr Emma Law narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. The FDA has cleared Roche's Elecsys pTau217 blood test to help identify amyloid pathology in people aged 55 and over who are already showing signs of cognitive decline. Most of the attention has gone to what that means for diagnosis and for access to new treatments. In this blog, Emma takes a different angle, asking what it changes for...

Dr Ajantha Abey narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. In part one, Ajantha covered the practical lab-hacks: experiment numbering, file naming, reference managers and spreadsheets. This time he moves up a level, to the habits that sit around the experiments rather than inside them. He makes the case for recording why you made a decision and not just what you did, keeping every half-for...

Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Connor works in dementia epidemiology, so when he wondered whether LGBT people face a higher risk of dementia, he assumed the answer was sitting in a paper somewhere waiting to be looked up. It mostly isn't. There is one large study with a marginal signal, a second with an outcome that may not measure what we want it to, and a...

Professor Louise Serpell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. What does a grant panel member actually notice when they open your application? This blog walks through a grant from the reviewer's side of the desk, covering the short summary, the lay summary, the case for support, and the often underexplained art of justifying your costings. It also covers what happens once a decision i...

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 sto...

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 t...

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...

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...

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 th...

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 frontotempora...

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...