Jobs

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 else. His advice when confidence takes a knock is to communicate early, and above all to slow down rather than try to match anyone else's pace.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-learning-to-belong-somewhere-new/

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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 modelling and machine learning to measure dementia risk. Connor blogs about his research, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and sometimes his Pomapoo’s.
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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers, drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, who we thank for their ongoing support.
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In this clip from Agentic AI and the Future of Dementia Research, Niranjan Bose explains the origins and purpose of the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative @ADDataInitiative. He describes how the organisation was created to make #dementia research datasets more available, accessible and usable for researchers around the world.

The full episode goes on to explore AD Workbench, agentic AI, the Alzheimer’s Insights AI Prize, and how new AI tools could help researchers ask better questions of existing data. Watch or listen to the full show to hear how data sharing, AI and collaboration could shape the future of dementia research.
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In this clip from 'Agentic AI and the Future of Dementia Research', Niranjan Bose from @ADDataInitiative explains what agentic AI means and how it differs from simple automation or standard chatbot tools. Using a clear example, he describes AI systems that can work through a task from start to finish, then connects this to dementia research, where agentic AI could help researchers find datasets, request access, run analyses, generate charts, and suggest hypotheses to test.

The full episode goes much further, exploring the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative, AD Workbench, the Alzheimer’s Insights AI Prize, and the two winning teams developing AI tools to support dementia research. Watch or listen to the full show to hear how these platforms could change how researchers ask questions, analyse data, plan experiments, and work with AI as a research partner rather than a replacement.
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In this episode, Professor Louise Serpell brings together Niranjan Bose from the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative, Jonathan Hoover from the AI company Prima Mente, and Kexin Huang from Stanford University and Biomni AD. They discuss the Alzheimer’s Insights AI Prize and what agentic AI could mean for the future of dementia research.

We hear about the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative and AD Workbench, and their role in making research data more accessible, usable and secure. The conversation also looks at how the Alzheimer’s Insights AI Prize could help researchers make better use of that data, turning complex resources into practical tools for discovery.

Kexin introduces Biomni AD, an AI research assistant designed to help scientists develop questions, bring data together and move from ideas to results more efficiently. Jonathan introduces Parthenon and Athena, a virtual wet lab system that helps researchers model cell states, test perturbations and plan experiments.

Together, the guests consider how AI can support researchers without replacing human judgement, and why confidence in using these tools is likely to become an important skill for dementia researchers.

In this episode:

🧠 AI can support researchers by helping with data, workflows and experimental planning, but it still needs human judgement, review and validation.

📊 AD Workbench from Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative is helping make dementia research data more accessible, usable and secure, giving researchers better ways to work across complex datasets.

🤖 Agentic AI could help researchers move more quickly from a research question to an analysis plan, useful evidence or a possible experiment.

🧪 Biomni AD, Parthenon and Athena show how AI tools are becoming more specialised, from research assistants to virtual wet lab systems.

🎓 AI literacy is likely to become an important skill for dementia researchers, including those without coding or data science backgrounds.

Essential Links:

Sign up for AD Workbench: https://bit.ly/ADWB-DRP
AD Data Initiative: AD Data Initiative: https://www.alzheimersdata.org/
Alzheimer's Insights AI Prize: https://bit.ly/AI_DRP
Prima Mente: https://www.primamente.com/
Biomni-AD: https://biomni.stanford.edu/

A transcript of this show, links and show notes and profile on all our guests are available on our website at https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk
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Chapters

00:00 Introduction to AI in Dementia Research
01:56 The Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative
07:47 Understanding Agentic AI
13:14 Challenges in Alzheimer's Data Sharing
16:04 The Alzheimer's Insights AI Prize
18:55 BioMe AD: The AI Co-Scientist
24:35 The Future of AI in Research
27:27 Integrating Multimodal Data for Alzheimer's Research
29:20 Challenges in AI Integration for Research
31:43 Enhancing Accuracy in AI Outputs
32:28 Prima Menta and the Concept of a Virtual Wet Lab
37:06 AI as a Collaborative Partner in Research
45:49 Defining the Role of AI in Research
48:05 Encouraging Adoption of AI Tools in Research

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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 will look like weakness. The turning point is a passing comment from another Principal Investigator about the long wait after their own positive outcome, which leads to the reassurance that conditional awards and iterative feedback are entirely normal. It ends by asking why funding success is so often presented as a clean, decisive win when the reality is iterative, negotiated and full of near misses. You can read it or listen to the audio narration.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-what-my-first-major-nihr-award-taught-me/
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Dr Maria Drummond is Team Leader at ENRICH Scotland, based at the University of Glasgow. A registered nurse and district nurse by background, Maria spent ten years working in the Glasgow City District Nursing service before moving into research in 2021. She also has five years of experience working in older adult care homes, including with people living with dementia. Her research focuses on care homes and is motivated by the priorities of staff, residents and people with lived experience. Funded through the NIHR Research Programme for Social Care, Maria is passionate about improving access to research involvement, evidence based practice and better outcomes for people living and working in care home settings.

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#nihr

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As biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease continue to advance, are cognitive assessments keeping pace. And how can we better detect early changes using tools we already have.

This livestream is part of the Dementia Researcher weekly Showcase series. Each week we host a 45 minute online session bringing researchers together to share their work, methods, and ideas.

In this session, Dr will present his work on developing neurocognitive metrics that are sensitive to Alzheimer’s disease pathology. His research focuses on extracting more informative measures from existing neuropsychological tests, rather than relying on entirely new tools.

These approaches aim to provide accessible, non proprietary methods that can better align cognitive assessment with advances in biomarker research, helping to improve early detection and understanding of disease progression.

Dr Davide Bruno is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology at Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Wisconsin Madison. His work sits at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and clinical research, focusing on improving how we measure and detect changes in brain function.
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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.

Read the report: https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/survey/

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 would take to bring people back.

A note on how this was made. The audio is an AI generated discussion, produced using Google's NotebookLM from the text of the report. The two voices are synthetic, and the framing, emphasis and phrasing are the model's rather than ours. We have checked it against the source for accuracy, but it is best treated as a way into the report rather than a replacement for reading it.

This is a pilot, and we are trying it out to see whether it is worth doing more of. We would genuinely like to know what you think: whether it worked for you, what fell flat, and whether you would like more episodes like this. Do let us know.

Reference: Smith, AM., Shaaban, C.E., Bartels, S.L., Welikovitch, L., Brum, W., Folarin, R. (2022). Listening to Early Career Researchers. University College London, ISTAART PIA to Elevate Early Career Researchers.

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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 she is "there yet".

The neuroscience is real: the history of torpor research, the compounds that could induce it, the brain regions involved.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-if-i-fall-behind-ill-fall-into-torpor/
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Dr Tatiana A. Giovannucci is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UCL's Institute of Neurology, Dementia Research Centre and UK Dementia Research Institute, studying the turnover of proteins relevant to neurodegeneration. She holds an Alzheimer's Association Research Fellowship and is part of a Race Against Dementia team, having completed her PhD at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm before joining UCL in 2022. Originally from Medellín, Colombia, she can usually be found upside down doing acroyoga when not in the lab.

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In this extra clip from the Dementia Researcher podcast Leaving Academia, Staying in Research, Dr Alice Carstairs from Alzheimer’s Society reflects on moving from academia into science communications. She talks about the need to unlearn academic jargon, explain dementia research in clearer language, and think carefully about who research communication is really for.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about leaving academia, finding research adjacent roles, and building a career that still supports dementia research outside a traditional university pathway.

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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 to change projects. The science is serious. The journey to being any good at it is, by Beccy's own account, fairly chaotic.

https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-the-trials-and-tribulations-of-electrophysiology/
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Beccy Owen is a PhD Researcher at the University of Warwick, exploring how tau pathology disrupts neuronal ion channels and brain network activity in Alzheimer’s disease. As part of the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Programme, her work uses electrophysiology to better understand the molecular drivers of neurodegeneration. Originally from the Welsh countryside, Beccy’s passion for dementia research was shaped during her postgraduate studies and through personal experience with a family member living with the condition. She will be sharing her journey, insights, and lessons learned throughout her PhD here on the blog.

Find Becky on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/beccyowen/)
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Enjoy listening? We're always looking for new bloggers, drop us a line. http://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk

This podcast is brought to you by University College London in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's Research UK, Alzheimer's Society and Race Against Dementia, who we thank for their ongoing support.
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#electrophysiology

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