Dementia Researcher Blogs

Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Every researcher knows the sinking feeling of an experiment failing after days, weeks or months of effort. In this blog Beccy talks about how she has learnt to stop letting failed experiments dictate her mood, and why they do not make you a bad scientist. She shares the best advice she has been given, from a lab manager who told her not...

Harriet Greene narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Harriet wrote her first essay on Alzheimer's at 15. What followed was not a tidy line to Oxford. She missed medicine by one mark, took her insurance place in Neuroscience at Queen Mary, topped her cohort's dissertation grades, then packed a backpack for a tiny island off Bali to learn to dive. A broken arm in Australia sent her home...

Professor Frank Gunn-Moore narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Frank asks whether dementia is really unique to humans. Starting with the story of his cat Cardhu, and moving through research on dogs, dolphins, whales and other long-lived species, he explores what animal biology can teach us about memory, ageing, Alzheimer’s pathology and why some species may be more vul...

Dr Sam Moxon narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. You develop something genuinely different, cost it, build the team, submit it feeling confident, and then the rejection lands. In this blog, Dr Sam Moxon sits with the researchers who keep watching their most original ideas fall at the panel while safer, more familiar work sails through. He asks a question the field tends to avoid: ar...

Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Becky reflects on creating a new lecture course for second year biomedical scientists, built around the molecular basis of neurodegenerative disease and dementia. She explains how teaching current research, from diagnosis and biomarkers to proteins, RNA, models, trials and uncertainty, helped students connect scienti...

Brandon Newman narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this guest blog, Brandon Newman uses his experience as a paramedic to show how dementia care can be misread when clinicians only see a brief snapshot of someone’s life. He argues that shared care records and digital Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment can bring together information from paramedics, GPs, memory clinics, hospital te...

Rahul Sidhu narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Rahul explores the relationship between sleep and dementia, asking whether a few poor nights should really worry us. Drawing on research into the glymphatic system, amyloid beta, tau and long term studies of sleep duration, the blog explains why sleep is increasingly seen as an important part of brain health. It also offers reassurance...

Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Yvonne reflects on why academia can become so tightly bound to identity, especially in careers where work has no clear end point and success is shaped by papers, grants, recognition, luck and timing. Prompted by a friend’s emotional decision to leave academia, the piece explores how academic life can blur boundaries b...

Professor Louise Serpell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Amyloid is one of the most used words in Alzheimer's research, and Louise thinks we have got into the habit of using it too loosely. Amyloid is not a single thing. It is a structure, a way that many different proteins fold and assemble into fibrils, and the officially recognised list of amyloid precursor proteins now runs...

Bernie McInally narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Bernie reflects on his work supporting the Scottish Dementia Brain Tissue Bank, using a telephone cognitive assessment to explore a bigger question about identity, diagnosis and individuality. A single sharp comment from a woman with mild Alzheimer’s disease prompts him to ask whether researchers, healthcare staff and...

Emily Spencer narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Emily reflects on being around four months from her planned PhD submission date, and the amount of work still sitting beneath the surface. She writes about the pressure of finishing complex analysis, using a Gantt chart to keep thesis writing on track, the boost of a writing retreat, and the sudden disruption of confere...

Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. What is it actually like to start over somewhere new? After nearly a decade at Newcastle, where he did his undergraduate degree right through to his postdoc, Connor moved to the University of Edinburgh in December 2025. This blog looks at the other side of leaving. He writes about the energy of meeting people with fresh eyes,...

Dr Maria Drummond narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. There is a stage most researchers never write about: the stretch between a positive funding decision and actually getting started. This blog is about exactly that. It follows the news of a first major NIHR award arriving on a Friday afternoon at a farm park, the relief and disbelief of the moment, and then the confusion when the...

This episode works through Listening to Early Career Researchers , the 2022 survey report from UCL and ISTAART PEERs. It captured the views of early career researchers across the world. Work is currently underways to run this same survey again, so we thought this was a good time to recap on the original findings. The discussion follows the data rather than the headlines: why people come into demen...

Dr Tatiana A. Giovannucc narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Tatiana's blog is not what you might expect. It is a speculative fiction, set in a near future where AI-driven energy demands and climate collapse have forced governments to ration heating and power, and academics have been classified as non-essential. The only escape from enforced hibernation, which the world calls "the l...

Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Electrophysiology has taken up roughly 80% of Beccy's thoughts this past year, so she has written about it. Beccy is a PhD student at the University of Warwick studying how tau drives ion channel dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease, and she uses whole-cell patch-clamp and extracellular field recordings to do it. In this blog she walks th...

Dr Sam Moxon narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. We tend to picture dementia as a slow decline measured in months and years, tracked through cognitive scores and longitudinal data. Sam has watched several relatives live with the condition, and from a family seat it looks nothing like a line on a graph. In this blog he writes about his grandfather, who some days could hold a full con...

Rahul Sidhu narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Rahul used to dread public speaking more than data analysis or academic scrutiny. A few years on, he gives talks to full rooms, chairs sessions at international conferences in Toronto and Washington DC, and speaks as a Global Ambassador for the Alzheimer's Association. In this blog he shares the seven things that got him there, from ac...

Dr Clíona Farrell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Clíona writes from this year's Hot Brain conference , an annual meeting hosted by UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and The Lancet Neurology that asks what the climate crisis is doing to our brains. She walks through what's already known (air pollution is now a recognised modifiable risk factor for dementia), what's emergin...

Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Yvonne reflects on the contradiction at the heart of being a junior PI: you are expected to mentor, lead and invest in the people who join your lab, but you also need them to produce so you can publish, win the next grant and stay employed. Yvonne writes about losing an RA she could not afford to keep, the structural way junior lab...

Dr Toby Williamson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Toby explores how values shape dementia research, even when we tell ourselves research is neutral. He looks at the tension between biomedical and social models of disability, the limits of evidence-based practice when the evidence base is thin or contested, and the case for values-based practice as a complement to...

Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Becky writes up what she took from a panel of disabled researchers hosted by her department's Disability Working Group, and turns it into practical guidance for managers and PIs. She covers flexible working, communication that respects privacy, the often-exhausting process of securing accommodations, and the case for...

Emily Spencer narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. With less than five months of PhD funding left, Emily found herself doing the opposite of what felt sensible. Instead of locking in on her analysis, she spent two months preparing a postdoctoral fellowship application. In this blog she writes about the strange shift from career fog to a clearer sense of direction, the reality of usin...

Professor Louise Serpell, narrates her blog written for the Dementia Researcher website. In this blog, Louise reflects on why Alzheimer’s disease has proved so difficult to understand, despite more than a century of research. She traces the role of amyloid beta, tau, inflammation, synaptic loss, genetics, ageing, the microbiome and other factors, while also asking what research models can and cann...

Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Connor reflects on leaving Newcastle University after nearly ten years, tracing the shift from student to researcher and the difficulty of stepping away. He explores the practical challenges of finishing work, managing data and staying motivated, alongside the emotional weight of leaving a place that shaped both his career and...