Dementia Researcher Blogs

07:52

Dr Connor Richardson - Does Rugby Cause Dementia? A...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/10/06

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 live long enough to be diagnosed, and the difference between relative and absolute risk. He closes with what

en

09:40

Bernie McInally - Pandas, dementia and why we need to...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/10/06

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 door: recruitment, ethics, capacity, busy staff, worried families. It asks whether those are reasons to stay

en

20:59

Dr Chloe Fawns-Ritchie - When research becomes your...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/30

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 screening test scored above the cut-off because it was administered wrongly.Later, dementia care and

en

10:38

Dr Yvonne Couch - Understanding Changes to UKRI...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/29

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 and more ambitious science. But the researchers caught between early-career schemes and programme grants

en

06:53

Emily Spencer - From Dreading My Thesis to Loving...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/24

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 headspace all play a part. So does the unexpected help that came from returning after maternity leave with far

en

07:41

Dr Clíona Farrell - Forty years of dementia progress;...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/22

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 before Carol's own death from the disease in 2024.In this blog Clíona, reports from a UCL200 screening of the

en

11:29

Dr Becky Carlyle - How not to lose the plot when you...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/17

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 start months before the last afternoon.The second half is about the part of the job nobody puts in the

en

08:11

Beccy Owen - 10 Things My PhD Has Taught Me So Far

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/16

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 whole point, and how a flash talk given two weeks into her studies changed how she handles new challenges

en

05:30

Jacqui Kerr - Returning to My Roots: Visiting a...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/09

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 people asking how to take part, what would be expected of them, and whether living miles from a study site

en

12:12

Rahul Sidhu - My Grandad’s Story: Why I Became a...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/07

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 survived Partition and rebuilt his life in England, then walks through how the disease changed him, the

en

14:21

Dr Yvonne Couch - Brain Drain: The Controversy Around...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/03

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 vasculature makes a proper lymphatic network hard to picture, and how a 2012 paper from Maiken Nedergaard's

en

14:14

Dr Emma Law - pTau217 Blood Test for Alzheimer's:...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/09/02

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 the people who design and deliver dementia studies. Her view is that a clearance like this reshapes the

en

13:26

Dr Ajantha Abey - More Research Habits I Wish I'd...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/26

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-formed idea in one running list, building relationships with colleagues long before you need a protocol or a

en

06:17

Dr Connor Richardson - We're Still Not Counting LGBT...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/26

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 third that finds nothing at all. Connor walks through what each one can and cannot tell us, then arrives

en

09:40

Professor Louise Serpell - Getting a Grant Funded: A...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/24

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 is close: responding to reviewers' comments and getting through the interview. Practical, panel-tested

en

06:21

Beccy Owen - Giving Your First Seminar: What I Learned

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/20

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

en

05:19

Harriet Greene - The PhD Comfort Zone

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/18

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

en

10:22

Dr Emma Law - GCP Training: Do We Really Need Regular...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/13

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

en

07:03

Professor Frank Gunn-Moore - An Academic career, then...

Dementia Researcher Blogs ·

2026/08/12

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

en

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

en

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Rabbit Hole of Research

Jotham Austin, II PhD, Nick Elizalde,...

Sleep Science

Sleep Science

PBS News Hour - Science

PBS News

Sur les traces de la Préhistoire

ICI Périgord

La Brújula de la Ciencia

Alberto Aparici