Dementia Researcher Blogs

09:28

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

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/10

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

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07:58

Emma & Sue Williams - A what? A Public Advisor...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/06

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

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06:06

Emily Spencer - Overcoming Academic Conference...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/05

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

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12:38

Adam Smith - Good Research Still Needs an Audience

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/31

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

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09:54

Dr Yvonne Couch - Pedagogy For Gen Z

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/30

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

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06:28

Dr Lindsey Sinclair - What Sport Can Teach Science

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/29

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

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09:02

Rahul Sidhu - Weightlifting and Creatine on Brain Health

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/28

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

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18:18

Dr Ajantha Abey - Research Habits I Wish I’d Started...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/26

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

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06:29

Dr Clíona Farrell - An Alzheimer’s Cabaret

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/22

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

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07:25

Dr Connor Richardson - Small Vessel Disease: A Quiet...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/22

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

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07:32

Professor Louise Serpell - Football, CTE and the...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/19

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

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08:18

Beccy Owen - When Experiments Fail: Staying Positive...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/09

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

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08:20

Harriet Greene - How I Found My Way into Dementia...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/09

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

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05:36

Professor Frank Gunn-Moore: Do Cats, Dogs and...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/07

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

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06:09

Dr Sam Moxon - Why Some Ideas Never Get a Chance

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/07/06

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

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10:25

Dr Becky Carlyle - How I Started My Own Lecture Course

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/06/25

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

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08:08

Brandon Newman - Why data matters in human-centred...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/06/24

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

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06:52

Rahul Sidhu - Sleep and Dementia: Should We Worry?

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/06/18

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

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09:23

Dr Yvonne Couch - Academia and the Sense of Self

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/06/16

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

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04:12

Professor Louise Serpell - What's in a name? Amyloid,...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/06/15

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

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