Dementia Researcher Blogs

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Do we actually need to teach Gen Z differently, or do they just need to grow up a bit? Yvonne read a Times Higher Ed article that annoyed her enough to annoy several colleagues with it, and this blog is what came out. She is not convinced by shorter lectures with cliffhangers. She is much more interested in what happens when you hand third years a hypothetical million pounds and ask them what they would do with it. Along the way she tests one of her own...

Dr Lindsey Sinclair narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Is time invested in something really time wasted if you don't win? A comment overheard at a rowing regatta set Lindsey thinking about what sport has given her career in science, beyond callouses and a dodgy shoulder. A former school sport hater turned qualified coach, Lindsey maps the anatomy of a 2000m race onto the life of a research project, from crew selection to the final push for the line, and makes the case that some of the most useful research skills are learned nowhere near a...

Rahul Sidhu narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Does lifting weights actually protect your brain, and is creatine the brain supplement the gym world thinks it is? Rahul goes through what the evidence really supports, from insulin sensitivity and inflammation to blood flow, which happens to be his own PhD specialism. He is even-handed about creatine too: promising in the lab, far shakier once you get to human trials. Worth a read before you order another tub.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-weightlifting-and-creatine-on-brain-health/

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​Rahul Sidhu is a PhD st...

Dr Ajantha Abey narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher.

There are already about a thousand blogs telling you to pace yourself and embrace failure. This is not one of them. Ajantha has written up the unglamorous systems he either set up early in his PhD and still thanks his past self for, or wishes he had. Experiment numbering. File names that actually tell you something. One place for every note. A reference manager with tags that earn their keep. Figures made as you go rather than in a panic at the end. Plus a spreadsheet he...

Dr Clíona Farrell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

After a long week at AAIC in London, Clíona swapped the conference hall for the Bloomsbury Theatre and a one-woman cabaret called Unforgettable. It tells the story of Tamara, who lost her father to familial young-onset Alzheimer's at 45, and who lives with a 50% chance of carrying the same mutation. What Clíona expected to be an evening of tears turned out to be funny, dynamic and strange in the best way, with a bubble machine, a lit-up hula hoop and a family horse among the cas...

Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher.

Ask most people what causes dementia, and they will reach for amyloid and tau. But there is another contributor sitting behind almost half of all cases worldwide, and it rarely gets the attention its scale deserves. Connor introduces cerebral small vessel disease: what it does to the tiny vessels deep in the brain, why it so often travels alongside Alzheimer's rather than on its own, and what recent imaging work suggests about spotting the people most at risk before decline sets in. There is a hopeful thread...

Professor Louise Serpell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher.

As excitement builds around the 2026 World Cup final, Louise examines the darker side of the beautiful game: the relationship between repetitive head impacts, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and dementia. She explains what distinguishes CTE from Alzheimer’s disease, explores progress towards diagnosis and treatment, and considers how changes to the rules of sport could protect future generations.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-football-cte-and-the-science-protecting-future-players/

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Professor Louise Serpell is an Emerita Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on...

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 to let a bad result follow her home, to knowing when to stop and re-evaluate rather than keep going down a dead end. Along the way...

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, a summer as a divemaster in Corfu taught her more than she expected, and somewhere between the dive boat and the papers she kept reading, she realised she missed...

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 vulnerable, or more protected, than others.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-do-cats-dogs-and-dolphins-get-dementia-too/

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Professor Frank Gunn-Moore is an academic and researcher in neurodegeneration and dementia research at th...

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: are our funders too risk averse to back the ideas that might actually change things, and what does that caution do to the people early in their careers who cannot afford...

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 scientific discovery with the real challenges of dementia. The blog also offers practical advice for anyone thinking of building a course of their own, including teaching what you know, checking what students have already covered, giving clear handouts, designing fair exam...

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 teams and families, helping clinicians understand a person’s baseline, support network, history and wishes. The piece makes the case that better data is not about replacing clinical judgement or compassion, but about giving professionals the cont...

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. Occasional restless nights are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on dementia risk, but persistent sleep disruption over months or years, including conditions such as sleep apnea, deserves attention.

The blog ends...

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 between job and self, making rejection feel personal rather than professional. Drawing on ideas around enmeshment and identity construction, Yvonne argues that researchers need more than one way to understand their value. A...

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 to 42 and keeps growing. Tau forms amyloid. Insulin can. So can the antibodies that deposit in the heart and skin. Bacteria even build functional amyloid to stick themselves...

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 policymakers sometimes overstate the idea of a single “dementia community”. The blog argues that people do not lose their life history, humour, opinions or preferences because of a diagnosis. Instead, dementia becomes one part of a person’s life...

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 conference season. The blog also explores the tension between preparing presentations, writing journal papers, applying for fellowships, and protecting enough time to finish the thesis. An unsuccessful fellowship application becomes, unexpectedly, a...

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, the strange comfort of mundane admin in those first few days, and the imposter syndrome that arrives when the evidence base you relied on for belonging is suddenly somewhere...

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 award turns out to be conditional. Over the following five months come rounds of committee feedback, clarifications and revisions, along with a quiet fear that asking too many questions...

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 dementia research, what keeps them awake at night, and why so many told us they were considering leaving the field. It ends on a more hopeful note about what it...

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 long sleep", is to prove your research is exceptional enough to warrant the electricity. Tatiana's narrator is hours from her exemption panel interview, performing a protein assay to calm her nerves, and asking herself whether...

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 through what these techniques actually involve.

She writes about crying the first time she got a stable recording, dreaming about pipette tips, and the friend who genuinely wondered if she would have...

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 conversation and other days had no idea who Sam was. Time stopped behaving normally. It folded back on itself when a question got asked again five minutes later...

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 accepting that nobody starts good at this, to building slides that help rather than hinder, to speaking with energy instead of just slowing down. His point throughout is that strong speaking is...

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 emerging (people with dementia were among the leading causes of excess deaths during the 2022 UK heatwave), and the questions still wide open. She also covers thermoregulation research, the case for saunas and hot-water im...

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 labs train people up only to lose them to bigger, better-resourced ones, and her struggle to define what her job actually is when the criteria...

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 EBP. Drawing on his PhD at the Geller Institute for Ageing and Memory (completed at 62), he reflects on what counts as evidence, what gets funded, and what gets overlooked. He closes with an invitation...

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 designing labs so accessibility is built in from the start rather than bolted on later. Becky shares figures that should give the sector pause, including the gap between the proportion of working-age people with a disability and...

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 using conversation analysis on video recordings of GP consultations involving people with dementia, and why letting go of her data at the end of her PhD started to feel impossible. A useful...

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 cannot capture. The blog argues that Alzheimer’s is shaped across a lifetime, by biology, environment, experience and individual variation, making collaboration across research fields essential for better prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

Find the orig...

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 identity.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-leaving-your-university-after-10-years/

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Dr Connor Richardson is a Neuro-epidemiology Research Associatea at The University of Edinburgh. His research interest lie in using advanced statistical...