Dementia Researcher Blogs

Dr Yvonne Couch , narrates her blog written for the Dementia Researcher website. Search ‘Academic quit lit’ and you’ll find tales of disillusionment, pages of personal accounts posted on blogs, social media, or websites. Stories of precarious careers, bureaucracy, barriers, and pain of departing. In this blog Yvonne, talks about the great academic resignation which seems to be occurring. Trying to...

Dr Aida Suárez-Gonzalez narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Systematic reviews are powerful ways to assess the state of knowledge on a particular research topic. They appraise and collate all relevant empirical evidence and their impact can be enormous: from informing clinical decision-making to global policy. That is why it is critical that we conduct them with rigour. In this blog...

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Dementia research has been in the news again. Sadly, there is no promising new drug on the horizon, and no new breakthrough in our understanding of the brain diseases, like Alzheimer’s, which lead to dementia. Instead, we find ourselves shocked by an investigation into what has become a high-profile case of potential academic mi...

Dr Anna Volkmer , narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Have you ever pre-registered your study? When you preregister your research, you're simply specifying your research plan in advance of your study and submitting it to a registry.  Preregistration separates  hypothesis-generating   (exploratory) from  hypothesis-testing  (confirmatory) research. Both are important. But the same da...

Nathan Stephens narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. A formality for those working towards a masters or PhD and conducting qualitive research is to acknowledge and articulate their subjectivity and reflexivity. In this post Nathan tries to get his head around these two complex sounding and entangle concepts, and hopefully provide some insight for others who like him, who are currentl...

Beth Eyre  narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Some of you, who follow my social media, will already be aware that I’ve just moved from the UK to the USA for a 6-month research placement at the University of Pittsburgh. Moving abroad as a PhD student can be very overwhelming, especially as no one really tells you what to do or what to expect particularly regarding the actual moving...

Dr Clarissa Giebel narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Each year 30 research scientists are paired with UK parliamentarians and civil servants. They learn about each other’s work by spending time together in Westminster and the researcher’s institutions. Those taking part gain an insight into how research findings can help inform policy making, and come away with a better understand...

Hannah Hussain narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. PhDs are just for academics, right? Wrong! While having a PhD is almost always a must for progressing along the academic career trajectory, this is not their only purpose! The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) published a report in 2020 on career ambitions of PhD students and found that although 2/3rds of PhD students want a...

Dr Yvonne Couch , narrates her blog written for the Dementia Researcher website. Yvonne shares her thoughts and tips on the peer review process, some basic things to think about when reviewing both papers and grants and help you think about framing them in a way which is both professional and kind. There are some excellent resources online on this by places like Wiley feel free to go and check the...

Adam Smith narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. It has been a few months since Adam put fingers to keyboard and wrote a blog. He tells us that he 'needs to be inspired', but these are inspirational times. In this blog, Adam has a simple message… it’s a great time to need research funding, because there is lots of it around! Adam highlights some of the currently open funding calls, an...

Dr Sam Moxon , narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. There are few things as important to our society as the ability to communicate with one another. It helps us express our ideas and feelings, understand the thoughts and emotions of others and build relationships. Communication allows us to both learn new ideas and pass our knowledge on. Without the ability to communicate, we would l...

Dr Aida Suárez-Gonzalez narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. One of the types of dementia I investigate in my research is Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA). PCA is also called the visual variant of Alzheimer´s disease (AD) because the syndrome is characterised by early and disabling visual difficulties and most (although not all) cases show underlying AD pathology. PCA is a young onse...

Dr Clarissa Giebel narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Have you met Clarissa in real life? Well, she has been out and about, and in this blog she discusses the value of in-person conferences, just incase you need some encouragement. Find the original text, and narration here on our website. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/guest-blog-the-value-of-conferences-in-a-since-pand...

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Modelling human disease in animals has significantly advanced our understanding of major diseases and ways of treating them. Mammalian model systems, like mice, continue to be the dominant model of choice, with 79% of experimental and breeding procedures using rats or mice in Great Britain in 2020. However, these traditional mod...

Nathan Stephens narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. You already know Nathan the PhD Student, but what about Nathan the unpaid family carer? There are a number of reasons why he hasn't shared his and his family's lived experience with ‘you’ to date. It’s not because he's a fraud, nor because he hasn't tried... but because he simply couldn’t until now. In this post I he sheds a glimme...

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Are there are some days when all you feel you do is write? We imagine the life of a scientist is spent in the lab running experiments and making discoveries. The reality is far different. The further along Kam progresses in her career, the more time she spends outside the lab and in the office. Writing. But what is she writing a...

Last week we attended the Alzheimer's Disease International Conference in London. We took time out from the programme to talk with early career dementia researchers to ask them about their work, the challenges they have faced and how they overcame them. In this short interview we talk with Esra Hassan, PhD Student from Brighton and Sussex Medical School. During her MSc Esra completed research in t...

Dr Yvonne Couch , narrates her blog written for the Dementia Researcher website. Yvonne was chatting with a friend recently about publishing things, and he was lamenting that he had a ton of stuff that was just sort of languishing unfinished. It was interesting but just not complete enough to be considered a paper. So today we’re going to talk about how we, as early career researchers, can help th...

Dr Anna Volkmer , narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Research in dementia is developing at a great pace. The race for a ‘cure’ may not be as close as we wish but there is so much more of a focus on developing what we can do to care and support people living with this diagnosis. Incidentally this aligns with a greater focus on, and acceptance of, qualitative research methods as a wo...

Dr Sam Moxon , narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Sam has been doing some soul searching recently, and he got to thinking about health, remembering something that was mentioned in a recent podcast recording. Sam recently hosted a podcast with some pretty eminent researchers (check out the latest show on our main podcast) involved in the Race Against Dementia (RAD) initiative. One o...

Dr Clarissa Giebel narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Only a few short years after completing a PhD you will (hopefully) find yourself as a new principal investigators (PIs), thrust into a role that includes administration and management, budgeting, mentoring and — perhaps most difficult — shepherding junior researchers to achieve their full potential. Many researchers receive litt...

Dr Aida Suárez-Gonzalez narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Lately Aida has been involved in many interview panels and, coincidentally, also in helping a substantial number of colleagues to prepare for grant and research job interviews. Her repeated exposure to the person specification assessment process in a short window of time has made Aida acutely aware of a few behaviours that...

Beth Eyre  narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Giving presentations is something that you can’t always hide from in science, and it’s one of those things that if you put off, they just become more and more daunting. In this blog Beth provides some tips that others have passed on to her and from the experiences she has gainedover the past couple of years. Find the original text, and...

Nathan Stephens narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Earlier this month Nathan attended the Alzheimer’s Society annual conference at the Park Plaza Hotel London. This was his first in person event, where the focus of the day was on improving early diagnosis. The conference brought together professionals from all knucks and crannies of the health system, as well as academics, students...

Dr Yvonne Couch , narrates her blog written for the Dementia Researcher website. OK so this one is going to be dull (Yvonne's words, not ours). There, I’ve said it. There will be no humour, no fun historical factoids and nothing exotic or interesting that you might use as pre-dinner conversation starters. But planning a budget for a grant is something that young researchers aren’t inherently prepa...