Podcast – Starting & Managing Academic Collaborations

Voiceover:

Hello and welcome to the Dementia Researcher podcast. Today we're talking about the bit of research that everybody says matters, but very few people are actually taught how to do, which is working with other people.

Adam Smith:

Hello, I'm Adam Smith. I'm the programme director for Dementia Researcher, and I'm delighted to be hosting today's show. We have forever been told that research is a team sport, and it's a lovely phrase right up until when you're trying to get 12 co-investigators to finish something and agree. At its best, collaboration gives an idea expertise, reach, and energy that no one person could ever possibly provide. But at its worst, it creates more meetings, less clarity, and a great deal of invisible work for whoever is organised enough to pick it up. So this is not a show about how to collect names that will look great on a grant application.

What we really want to know is how good partnerships really start and how you decide who to trust and what needs saying before the grant or paper gets underway. I'm joined today by four people whose working lives are dependent upon collaborations, but in very different forms. We have the incredible Dr. Sarah Marzi, who is a reader in neurogenomics at the UK Dementia Research Institute and a group leader at King's College London. Her work combines experimental and computational genomics.

And has involved international teams and major collaborative programmes, including as part of the Dementia Frontiers Fund and the Aligning Science Across Parkinson's Network. Hi Sarah, thank you for joining us.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Hello, hello.

Adam Smith:

Again, of course, you've been on the podcast lots of times before.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Lots of times.

Adam Smith:

And joining Sarah, we have first time on the podcast, Georgina Charlesworth, who is a professor of clinical psychology of ageing and dementia at University College London. She jointly leads the SPIN-D Network Plus, which connects researchers, practitioners, communities of people affected by dementia across the UK. Hi, Georgina.

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

Hi.

Adam Smith:

Next, we have Professor Nathan Davies, who is Centre Co-Lead and Professor of Ageing and Applied Health and Care Research at Queen Mary University of London. He is a principal investigator and co-director of the Alzheimer's Society Doctoral Training Centre for Integrated Dementia Care, an eight-year partnership involving five universities and 29 PhD students. Hi, Nathan.

Professor Nathan Davies:

Hi.

Adam Smith:

I don't think you've been on the podcast before, but we've done live streams together, right?

Professor Nathan Davies:

We did something once during COVID-19. I don't know if that was a podcast or a live stream. I can't remember.

Adam Smith:

Well, thank you very much for joining us today. And joining us to make up our fourth guest is another regular face you'll have seen before, who is the amazing Dr. Amanda Heslegrave, who is a principal research fellow at the UK Dementia Research Institute, also at UCL. She co-leads the Fluid Biomarker Laboratory and the UK DRI Biomarker Factory, a shared platform built around supporting and connecting research across many projects and disease areas. Hi, Amanda.

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

Hello, nice to be back.

Adam Smith:

You're all brilliant and I'm really grateful for you all taking time out to join me today. So before we start properly, could each of you introduce yourself in just one or two sentences and name the collaboration, team, or shared project that's currently taking up the most space in your head? And Sarah, I'm going to come to you first.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

All right, yeah, so I'm Sarah Marzi. I'm an epigeneticist working on neurodegenerative diseases to figure out how environmental and genetic risk factors predispose our brains to neurodegeneration. And we've just recently been awarded funding from the Dementia Frontiers Fund as part of our Team Emerald, together with Professor Henne Holstege in the Netherlands and Dr. Alexi Nott at Imperial College. And there's a lot of paperwork. contracting, recruitment, setting up and getting ready for a project start in November that's going on right now. So that's very present on my mind.

Adam Smith:

Brilliant. Thank you. And I'm looking forward to getting into the story behind that. Because when I saw the big news about that, the announcement about that a few weeks ago, I thought, ooh, there's got to be a story behind that collaboration. Thank you, Sarah. Georgina, let's come to you next.

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

Hi, I'm Georgina. I'm a psychologist. I've been at UCL for 25 years now, and the collaboration that I'm particularly involved with at the moment is SPIN-D, as you mentioned before, which is Sustainable Prevention, Innovation and Involvement Network for Dementia, which is one of the Dementia Network Pluses. It has on our grant I think about 35 different named co-applicants that involves not only sort of university academics but also community partners and from sixteen different organisations.

Adam Smith:

I'm not going to use the phrase herding cats because I'm sure they're all amazing and nothing at all like cats, but I can't wait to learn more about that. And Nathan.

Professor Nathan Davies:

Hi, I'm Nathan Davies. So I'm a professor of ageing based at Queen Mary. And I've been here for about two years now. And prior to that, I was also at UCL for about 15 years. And I do applied dementia care research, so both health and social care. And I think probably the one taking up most of my time at the moment is the iCARE Doctoral Training Centre. So like you said, Adam, that's quite a large piece of work over eight years with five different universities and just under 30 students. So it's quite a beast.

Adam Smith:

I feel like we could even do a separate show here on how many collaborations is too many, you know. But thank you very much, Nathan and Amanda.

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

So hi, I've been now working on biomarkers for neurodegenerative disease for about 14 years here. But really, I think since the Dementia Research Institute started, it's really ramped up in the amount of collaborations and the amount of people that we work with. And I'm going to say, I look at most of what we do, 95% of what we do is collaboration. So we can't function without those collaborators.

So it is my job to have all of them taking up my mind all of the time and so it's really difficult to answer one but I will say one thing that quite excited me recently even though it was quite painful was being asked to be a part of a Horizon Europe grant which at the time I thought about the people trying to organise it all and felt quite sorry for them but actually they did it really well because it was awarded to look at the exposome, that's what it is, anything we're exposed to and how that affects brain health and so we've got the biomarker part of that so yeah thinking about that quite a lot, looking forward to it.

Adam Smith:

Wow. Thank you, Amanda. I'm interested. I have got a question. I'm going to come back straight in to you. You're going to get a question now, which is how much of your time is doing your own research as opposed to being supporting so many other people's?

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

Yeah, I mean, I suppose that depends on how I look at all that research because we have so many close collaborations, like with the clinical team at the Dementia Research Centre, people in different DRI centres, such as the TBI people. So I consider, I've worked on a number of these things for years now, so consider that mine as well. But in terms of I have one PhD student at the moment looking at different methods of remote sampling to make it easier, cheaper to measure blood-based biomarkers. And I spend, yeah, probably not enough time on that because I have a lot of other commitments to fulfil.

And I suppose it is really your own research, because at some point anybody else's study that's got a biomarker element, they just trust you to do that, which is your own research. And they don't tell you what to do. You design it.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you very much.

How good academic collaborations begin

So to start, I'd like to talk about the bit before the grant application and think about how good collaborations actually begin. It feels like most worthwhile collaborations begin with an informal connection, someone you meet after a talk or an introduction or a paper you can't stop thinking about, or somebody admitting that they need some help. So Sarah, I'm going to come to you first. Tell us about a collaboration that began quite casually and became something much bigger.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

So I would like to give the example of actually Alexi Nott, who I mentioned earlier, and I first met Alexi in 2020 during COVID online when I tried to use some of his data from his amazing Science paper on cell type specific epigenomes, and I had emailed him and he just asked if I wanted to have a chat because we were both working in the same field. So, you know, we met on Zoom, and he hinted that he was on the job market and actually interviewing across the US. And I knew that the UK DRI at Imperial was still looking to recruit maybe one or two more people.

So I actually put him in touch with the director at the time and put in a good word for him. And yeah, that's how he ended up at Imperial, and then we shared a lot of the same experiences going through setting up our early labs together, and we work on quite similar things, although he comes at it from a background that's more based on molecular biology, genetics, genomics in his training and PhD postdoc, whereas my own background is more from the quantitative side originally.

And now we sort of span that whole spectrum, both of us, but we are very complementary because our original training and PhDs, deep expertise sort of comes from the two different directions.

And with him, yeah, we've run multiple studies together, but just in the last 18 months we've received two major grants together, one from the UK DRI, the Key Questions Scheme, and then the other grant is the Dementia Frontiers Fund Emerald project that I just mentioned, which is looking at resilience and studying centenarians from the 100-plus Study that Henne Holstege runs in Amsterdam, and really looking at what makes them so remarkably resilient to dementia and cognitive decline. What made you think, what was it about Alexi that made you think, this is somebody I want to work with?

So the first contact was because I thought the science was so exciting, what he was doing and how he was doing it, and also going all the way from sort of the statistical big picture epigenetic annotation to really functionally validating a specific enhancer that's in a genetic locus linked to Alzheimer's and showing that it has an effect that is specific to microglia. So bridging that whole field, if you will. But then knowing him now for many years, he's a wonderful person, really kind and smart and trustworthy. And we also work very, very well together.

And we've written a few grants together now and it's one of my best experiences because somehow we're constantly in touch and we're pushing each other and we're complementing our writing. So things actually get done pretty quickly when we work together and that's been really nice. And because we know each other so well, we can also check in really frequently and conversations about, you know, leadership roles, authorships or difficult topics are easier because we have that level of, yeah, knowing each other well and trusting each other. And do you work at the same level? Are you the kind of same grade? Are you at the same institution?

Do you Well, not the same institution anymore because I moved to King's College, but pretty much the same stage. We've had our group for the same amount of time, progressed in similar stages through the academic ranks. And so really the projects that we lead together quite often will be very equal contribution co-led projects. And you mentioned the Netherlands, the centenarians work there. How did that come about? Yeah, so I met Henne several years ago, maybe three years ago or so at a neuroimmune consortium meeting. It's this broader consortium that we're both part of.

And I gave a talk on our research into epigenetics in microglia in the context of Alzheimer's. And Henne has been collecting a lot of different layers of omics and functional annotation on centenarians, both the blood samples that are collected throughout the longitudinal study, but also there's a substantial subset of these centenarians who will go on to donate their brains to research. And so really looking at those brains as well, and there's a lot of proteomics and RNA sequencing and different things going on.

But she always thought that epigenetics was a key missing link in that picture because it can let us link the genetic variants, which are largely non-coding, directly to the gene regulatory functional mechanism, which cell types are they active in, and which genes do they contact downstream with 3D chromatin conformation. And so it's been something she had been thinking about.

And when she saw my talk, she was excited and she came up to me and we had our first chat and have been sort of casually chatting since then and kind of waiting for the right opportunity and right grant call to actually apply to, and this one seemed really perfect because one of the focus questions was resilience. And yeah, it's been a whirlwind because it's a very accelerated grant funding scheme. So from writing it to interviewing to the announcement, it was all accelerated timelines, but it's been really exciting and a wonderful experience so far.

Adam Smith:

So the birth of that again comes back to, as I said in my introduction, I guess, that you gave a talk somewhere, somebody spoke to you afterwards.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Yes. That's right.

Adam Smith:

I might pick you all up on that and see if that's happened to everybody. Because that makes a great case for saying, you know, go to conferences, present, follow up on those connections that we're always telling people to do, isn't it? Thank you very much, Sarah.

Who belongs on a grant application?

And Georgina, you've been very patient waiting there. SPIN-D has to bring together researchers and people affected by dementia and practitioners and community organisations across all of those four nations. When you build something that kind of broad, how do you decide who actually needs to be on the application, in the room?

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

Well, for that particular grant, it was Chris Fox who first started looking into developing it. And he has a particular way of doing this. Probably I ought to let him explain it himself, but as he isn't here, I'll tell you his method. He just invites everybody who he can think of, who he thinks might be relevant to a particular bid, sees who turns up and then sees who's still there a few meetings down the line in the development. And then works out whether there's any sort of missing skills or expertise that requires some additional invitations to sort of bring them in. So that seems to be sort of his approach for doing things.

I think for most of the bids that I'd been involved in before then, we were either more local collaborations with people that we already knew, or thinking of what Amanda was saying about the Horizon bid, being part of a pan-European group, so already being part of a network of interest on psychosocial interventions for people with dementia, and then there being those sort of cross-European collaborations.

But I should perhaps say that as somebody who spent a lot of time in the NHS as a psychologist and then between academia and that as clinical base, but for the SPIN-D project, obviously we were looking to make sure we had representatives from all of the stakeholder groups that we thought were going to be sort of relevant to that particular call.

Adam Smith:

That does sound highly risky if you start with a kind of big mailing list of let's just get this out there to 50 people. If it turns out everybody comes back and says, yes, you've then got the awkward thing of saying, by the way, we're dropping you off. Like you were included on the original, but now we've got too many people. Or do you start to grade people and say, right, you're the core team, you're the

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

But no no no, Adam, you've got to remember that people are busy, they've got stuff on. People are available, people are not available, people are really interested in a topic, people have other priorities. And I don't know, you'd have to ask Chris what his hit rate is, or whether there's been occasions when he's then needed to pare things down using his approach. But for SPIN-D in particular, we started with a big group by the time we had established who was interested. We then retained a big group because this was a network rather than a specific research project.

So if we knew that we had a particular work programme that we were wanting to follow in terms of research delivery, we might have gone about it in a slightly different way from where we were just wanting to make sure that we had a really broad network so there were lots of people with lots of fingers in lots of pies in order to try to continue or further build sort of collaborations between different sectors.

Building a doctoral training centre across five universities

Adam Smith:

Thank you, Georgina. Nathan, I'm going to come to you now. iCARE, we said in the introduction, brings together five universities for, is it eight years? This is a long-term thing and responsible for developing 29 doctoral researchers. Take us back to the beginning. Where did the idea come from and how did that kind of first core team come together?

Professor Nathan Davies:

As similar to what Georgina is saying, it's quite different when you're pulling together a research grant or a project idea as compared to a network or a doctoral training centre. So it was quite tricky actually to think about what is the idea or the glue that holds it all together really. So we had ideas about what we wanted it to include. So we wanted stuff on inequalities, we want to think about co-production. I was really interested in end of life. But what was it that was holding all that together? And, you know, integration is this kind of wicked problem, isn't it?

How do you get integrated care across health and social care, across different parts of care? So that seemed to be a very appealing topic and something that the Alzheimer's Society had also highlighted. So they gave quite a bit of steer, I would say, in the early days, they wanted it to be around the four transitions or five transitions that they had just launched around then as well. So we had quite a good steer. I think I was at a time where I really wanted to lead something big. I wanted to do something big and something different as well.

And I felt like a doctoral training centre, when this came up, I thought this sounds like a fantastic idea. Working with the Alzheimer's Society, I'd had a postdoc with them, I'd done multiple grants. So thought this was a really exciting time. And they were also really clear they wanted it to be a national programme. They didn't want it to be just based at one university, they wanted it to be national. And again, I thought that was a really exciting time to pull together lots of different people from, again, like Georgina was saying, lots of different expertise, lots of different disciplines, different people, experiences.

And so I remember reaching out to Claudia Cooper at the time and saying, I was really keen to do this. And I'd spoken to a couple of colleagues at UCL as well. And then it just kind of snowballed as to who we thought were some of the kind of key players who had experience in this kind of realm of leading doctoral centres or doing lots of PhD supervision and having really interesting pieces of work that we thought would be good to explore. And so that just led on to further conversations, further discussions, and the integration theme then came from all those initial discussions.

And we went to a few different meetings with various groups of people, not everyone joined in the end, because there was lots that you can imagine, as we've all in this room been. This was a national call. There was a lot of people going for this, a lot of competition. And so, you know, people did their own thing as well. So it was, yeah, it was an interesting time, I would say.

When others want to lead the same bid

Adam Smith:

Well actually you've just picked up on something at the end there that I was going to ask you about. And this might be something you've all experienced, is when you first start out to think, right, I'm going to lead an application on this, and you go reaching out to people to suddenly find that the people you're approaching are also planning to apply for that same thing. And so is there an honest conversation to say, well, okay, good luck, I'll go my way, you go your way, or, you know, how do you decide whether to team up or to go your separate ways?

Professor Nathan Davies:

Yeah, absolutely. There were quite a lot of honest conversations in the approach with this one. And I was quite clear I would like to lead, but it wasn't contingent that I had to be the lead or, you know, that I wouldn't be on someone else's instead of leading my own. But you know, I think it's important to be honest and upfront when we do these things and just put your cards on the table and, you know, what are you looking to get out of that? And that worked this time round, I think. You know, people who were potentially interested in leading said, I'm happy to support you, I don't need to lead this, I'm not worried.

And then other people said, we would like to lead this from ours. And then in the end, you know, after discussions, it was clear that there were two different bids. They weren't necessarily bids that could be merged or wanted to be merged really. So I think it's about having those open, honest conversations. And we're all used to having those kinds of conversations. So I don't think it's a bad thing or a too difficult thing to do.

Adam Smith:

I think also as well, the way that grant application processes seem to have been refined over the last couple of years, particularly, is that with this letter of intent stage or this expression of interest stage, the funders are getting more proactive in intervening part way through. So rather than having lots of people submit a grant application and have to reject them, they kind of reserve the ability to say, hey, can we tell this other person that you, and kind of encourage you to go together and team up?

Genuine collaboration or a request for a service?

Amanda, you've been very patient.

I know that people often approach a specialist lab like yours or a shared platform because they need an assay or they need a result. How do you tell the difference between kind of genuine scientific collaboration and transactional requests dressed up as collaboration? Because you must get quite a few of those.

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people, or the people that are probably easiest to work with, are the people that engage with me, that will meet and want to meet and talk about their project and perhaps do a little presentation, show us what it is that they're doing. And then rather than just say, I've got a thousand samples I'm going to bring around next Monday, you know, like so you can tell quite easily who's going to be a part of it as well.

And often, and I quite like this because it's helpful to my team as well, their junior researcher will come along and be a part of the assays that they're doing because sometimes I think it's really important that they know what happened and what we were doing and why we insist on certain pre-analytical requirements. So yeah, I feel like I'm fairly good now at telling who really wants to work with us and who just wants us to work for them.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. To buy a service. I mean, I know we've chatted before that you get so many requests. Are there a kind of set of questions that you ask now before you say yes to anything?

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

I suppose, have you got the money? It's really important actually because a lot of people are quite shocked that we won't just measure things for free, which is kind of a bit old school I think. But no, do you know what? I think partly the reason we've got so many collaborations is that I say yes. Mostly I just say yes and then see where it goes, which can mean that I have some stressful times but most of the time it proves to be quite fun actually.

Adam Smith:

So you heard it here first, listeners. Amanda says yes. That's amanda.heslegrave at.. yeah. Thank you very much, Amanda.

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

I learned it from my boss.

Big name or someone you trust to deliver?

Adam Smith:

I'm going to finish this first section here, which has been a long section, with a quick one, kind of one question to all of you, and I do want speedy answers. If you could choose between a big name or technical expertise or somebody you just trust to deliver on time, which are you going to go for? And I'm going to go to you first, Amanda.

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

Number two, the technical expert, the person I could trust to deliver. The big names are very frustrating at times. Apologies any big names who are listening, they're probably not though.

Adam Smith:

What about you, Nathan?

Professor Nathan Davies:

Same. Someone I trust that I know will deliver.

Adam Smith:

Georgina.

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

Yeah, yeah, I'm the same too, the technical expertise and the person you trust. Yeah. Somebody who's going to deliver on it.

Adam Smith:

Sarah, you've got to say something different now. You can't go with the

Dr Sarah Marzi:

I've got to say something different, I know. I mean, now I probably agree with this, but I have found in the very early stages of my independent career that big names can open quite some very locked doors that as an early career PI you wouldn't have access to, and can really change how your application is perceived. And they often come with a reputation, right? If someone evaluates a grant, for example, and there is someone with a stellar track record of delivering amazing results and projects on there, that gives them confidence that it can be done again.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. And be prepared for the fact though that any of those big names, they might not be the big name and the person that Nathan, Georgina and Amanda just mentioned there. But I absolutely agree with that. Thank you very much.

How to approach a potential collaborator

So to start this next section, I want to give you all a bit of a hypothetical. In your head, you've designed the perfect collaboration. Then you have to write the email and make the introduction or ask for the meeting without sounding vague or demanding, and also as well, don't want to appear like the deadline is next Friday and they're sending this email on Monday, like you've just remembered they'd be good.

I get a lot of emails like that. So Sarah, I'm going to come to you first. Your work crosses wet lab biology, genomics, statistics, computation. How do you approach someone whose expertise you need when you don't yet know enough about their field to frame the kind of perfect question?

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Yeah, I'm going to have to slightly redirect the question. I don't really do a lot of cold calling on people and I would never design a project and only then contact someone to ask them about it. So I would maybe cold call to develop something together, but then both of us involved in the design process. Or when it's about bringing new technical expertise to my field, I also never wanted to feel like someone is giving me something for free or it's a service where they're teaching us something. So it's often really collaborative.

And only with people that I've had long-standing work relationships and trusted collaborations with might I ask for advice or like, can I send someone to your lab to learn something? And one example is my lab has taken on over the last 18 months or so iPSC modelling as a new thing. So before we did a lot of work on post-mortem brain or we collaborated with others to do the cell and animal models and now we do some of the cell modelling in-house and you have to start somewhere. So also you hire people with that experience.

But what really helped is that we're embedded at King's College in a department where several people are doing iPSC modelling, particularly for ALS and modelling cortical and motor neurons. People that I have now ongoing collaborations with, so then it doesn't feel so transactional. For example, I've taken on a jointly supervised PhD student and that's really co-led by two groups that are producing that work together.

Adam Smith:

So that's a good point actually. So if you do notice that you've got a kind of skills gap when you start to build your grant, is maybe first of all to look internally to colleagues who are immediately around you, who you at least have some tenuous connection with because you work at the same place, rather than somebody somewhere else who you've maybe never met but have just seen their papers or read their reputation.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Yeah, exactly. I think that helps. I never wanted to feel like I'm just transactionally asking for something from someone who's a scientist and a leader in their own field.

Adam Smith:

Thank you very much. Amanda, I feel like my question here might be a little bit like the one you've already answered, but you receive plenty of approaches. What makes an invitation easy to say yes to? And what makes you suspicious? Obviously you said money before. They're going to pay you.

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

No, easy to respond to is when they actually have done a little bit of research and they know what we do, rather than assume that we're something else. We get lots of people coming to us saying, I want to send my samples one at a time and I want the results with cutoffs. That's a clinical lab. That's not what we are. We're a research lab. So you don't know what we do. So that would be my quick answer to that.

Adam Smith:

So make sure you've done your background processing, you understand. And if they.. obviously, is that available? I mean, can people find that out about you without having to talk to you?

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

Absolutely, they can look us up. There's a webpage somewhere, I think. Hopefully it's up to date. But it certainly is going to say that we're a research lab, you know, and there's kind of technologies that we have as well. So, you know, people should be able to find that out. So make sure you've done your background reading, that you're approaching somebody with a request that is actually reasonable.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. And Nathan, when you're assembling a grant team, how formed do you think the idea needs to be before you invite people in? 'Cause of course too early and there's nothing to react to, and too late and it doesn't really feel like collaboration anymore.

Professor Nathan Davies:

Yeah, exactly. So I think it varies. I think you need to have an idea, a top level idea of what it is you're looking to do. And then I think have those conversations with people that you know would be interested in that field or potential areas that you'd be exploring to make sure you develop it together, because otherwise you're not going to have their proper buy-in because you've just developed a project, it's your idea, you kind of have that ownership and you want ownership across the team and for people to buy into it and feel like they're part of it, they show up to the meetings.

There's nothing worse than having collaborators that just come on board and then you never see them. So I think having it, you know, from the start, as early as possible. But in saying that as well, you sometimes get, you know, quite a way through the development plan of it, and you realise that you're missing something, you're missing expertise and you hadn't really thought of it and you need to pull someone else in who can help you understand and unpick that area a little bit more. And I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that either. But, you know, ultimately you want most of your people quite early on.

Adam Smith:

I suppose in that case you just have to be honest, don't you? In saying, look, we've got this application, it's quite formed already, but we realised we had this gap. We thought.. bit of flattery doesn't go amiss either, does it? You would be amazing to bring in on this.

Professor Nathan Davies:

I think the worst is when you get a funding panel tell you you're missing a specific expertise. It's normally a clinical expertise that the panel tell you you're missing, and then you get an email off someone saying, the funding panel has told me I have to have someone like you. Well, that's not really flattery, so I think it's about approaching the right people as early as possible, but, you know, being honest about it as well.

Working with PPI, the NHS and community partners

Adam Smith:

And what I feel is appropriate to bring in there, of course, is that patient and public involvement part and that kind of co-production, who, you know, I know from experience are very passionate about being as involved in that process as early as possible. Have you ever had an experience where doing that has fundamentally changed the.. because of course, as we said at the start, you've got in your head what the perfect team looks like, what your study looks like, but sometimes bringing collaborators in can change that direction and not always necessarily in the way you wanted to go. How have you handled that before?

Professor Nathan Davies:

Yeah, I think that happens quite a bit with PPI actually, because you go to them with your kind of grand idea that you think is going to change the world or change the face of dementia care, and then your PPI will tell you, well that's just not going to work. That's nonsense, you know, that wouldn't have worked for my husband when he had dementia. And I think it's really important to listen to that and take that on board. And that's the bits that I think are the most exciting, is going back and changing. It's this iterative process. And the same thing with collaborators and co-applicants as well.

And you know, for me, I'm not a big data person, you know, I'm much more comfortable with qualitative research. But you know, I do a lot of mixed methods and I might put something together and say, we could do this. And then the data person comes in and says, are you crazy? That's not possible. You can't do that. So I think, you know, that's part of the fun of it, I think, and the creativity that comes with it.

Adam Smith:

That sounds like what Sarah says to people when [inaudible] comes. Thank you, Nathan. And Georgina, you've mentioned the NHS a few times there. What changes when a collaborator is an NHS service or a community organisation? Because you don't just work with researchers, you kind of work with whole organisations or services, not just academics. What changes about that dynamic?

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

The most important thing to remember is that they have a completely different set of priorities. The priority absolutely is not doing groundbreaking research that's going to be published in any particular journal. It's to serve the people that are users of that service. And so it makes a difference to timescales, to the focus, to the kind of research designs that people are willing to sort of jump on board and get involved with. And we've mentioned money already, Amanda mentioned money. And most organisations that are service providers are really short of cash.

And something that we've found really challenging is finding a way to try to make sure that universities pay in a timely way to organisations that absolutely don't have the funds to keep them going if they've been promised money but it isn't coming in.

Adam Smith:

And do you find that, say, for example, you're involving a not-for-profit organisation, do you have to kind of buy in more to the idea that you're inviting them as an organisation rather than an individual? And have you had examples where the person then changes? It isn't always necessarily the same person who pitches up, because they're representing that group.

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

Yes. Yes.

The answer is we've definitely sort of had that experience, well, I won't say especially where, but yes, it can easily happen that you have started the negotiations with an individual who then has a change of role or retires or who moves to a different organisation, and then you find you're sort of starting from the beginning with somebody else within that organisation who might have quite a different sort of perspective on what's going on, but you kind of just need to sort of roll with it and find a way to sort of make the connection and work out how to still have a meaningful and useful sort of collaboration, or decide whether in actual fact there needs to be a sort of parting of the ways on that particular project, but re-engage for something else in the future.

Adam Smith:

I was going to say, I guess in those instances it might be that that organisation drops out because maybe that person's role isn't existing in the new structure. They're leaving and there is nobody to replace them. So I'm going to end this section by asking everybody this slightly tongue-in-cheek question, which is what is the fastest way for a collaboration invitation to lose your interest? And I'm going to go to you first, Sarah.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

I mean I think it's something that we've already mentioned. It's when it sounds like you're providing a service, and in my case it would often be around data analysis and statistics. So yeah.

Adam Smith:

What about you, Georgina?

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

I think anything that's really long but you're still not quite sure at the end of it what exactly it's asking for. And then the other thing that we've had since we've had the SPIN-D network, which involves a kind of core lived experience group, is people just saying, can you provide a PPI person? You know, as if they're a commodity to be handed over. That doesn't sit well either.

Adam Smith:

And Nathan, then Amanda.

Professor Nathan Davies:

I quite often get asked if I'll lead PPI. And I don't think I'm the person who should be leading PPI. I think it should be the PPI leading that. So

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

And for me it's going to be when people email Henrik and then say, if he can't do it, would you? You can be the bonus prize or whatever, so that's the way to make me lose interest.

Adam Smith:

When you are the second choice. Yeah, I can get that. That's Henrik Zetterberg, of course. Yeah. Thank you very much.

Who writes a multi-institution grant?

So we know now what a friendly conversation can do. It can get a project started, but it can't run one. At some point, the enthusiasm has to become names against tasks and budgets and decisions and an understanding of who gets credit for what. Nathan, on a big grant involving several institutions, who actually writes it? And how do you stop collaborative drafting becoming something that 20 people add comments while one exhausted person does all the work?

Professor Nathan Davies:

I think people do it differently. People work in different ways, don't they? And I think you need to find the way that works for you and the people that you've got around you. I think ultimately one person is going to be responsible for the whole thing, because otherwise it will just look like a mismatch and like it's just been slapped together. So someone does need to take the whole overall lead and write the overall thing. But I think carving it up into constituent parts that people can take charge of and feel like they own a part of it, I think that's the right approach.

So, you know, if we have work packages, you put down work package leads, and a lot of the time they have been nominal work package leads traditionally. But actually I think we've got a lot better in research now, where, you know, work package leads are work package leads and they write that part and they lead that part throughout the programme or the project as well. So it should be a collaborative effort, but ultimately that one person does need to make sure it all joins up.

Adam Smith:

That's it, isn't it? It's a lot easier then if it's just one person trying to find the angle that strings all these work packages together. And also as well, I don't know, do you find that.. I don't just want a comment. If you want something changed, tell me what you want it changed to, that I can then agree to, not just a comment.

Professor Nathan Davies:

I think that's particularly important if it's a methodological comment as well, where they say, you know, you haven't really incorporated this part of implementation theory, or you need to think about this analysis. I don't have that expertise. So, you know, you're going to need to write that for me. That's why you're part of this bid, you bring that expertise. But I think that's about having conversations very early on, you know, when you're writing the bid, how are we going to work together? So have those regular meetings.

So it's not just about writing it as well, but it's about coming together as a team and having discussions, conversations and ways of working as well. All easier said than done, but this is how it should be, I think.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, getting round the table, getting in a room together to do that. Thank you.

Sharing leadership in academic collaborations

And Georgina, as you've touched on, you jointly lead a very large network with your fantastic colleague Chris Fox. How do you make co-leadership work without either duplicating every decision or leaving people unsure as to who's responsible?

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

Well, we try to have a system and I'm not sure we get it right every time, but we keep finding a way to sort of discuss those sorts of things. So for the particular network that we're involved with, we know that the finance is in Chris's institution and at UCL I only have the money for what's going on at UCL. So ultimately the financial stuff is based in Exeter. So you follow the money for that. And the project manager similarly is there. So we've got some quite clear areas of responsibility. Nathan had also mentioned different sort of work packages and work streams and who leads those.

So we try to sort of be clear about who's leading which particular sort of activity. But a lot of it just involves making sure that you're in contact and know who's doing what. And so we will have a meeting each week just to see what sorts of requests have come up, what sorts of things have been asked, what emails we've been receiving, just so that we have an idea of what the other's doing and saying. And then it's me that meets up with the operational leads, the administrator and the network manager, to then consider how we put in practice the set of principles that we try to have behind all of our decisions.

So for all of our activities, we try to make sure that there's co-production, that it involves early career researchers and involves multiple stakeholder groups, not necessarily all of them all the time, but that there's more than one group. And so whenever we're doing our decisions, we try to make sure that those sorts of principles have been taken into account as well.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, that makes sense. And it's kind of agreeing up front. Nathan, you talked about work packages, but almost dividing down leadership to say, right, these are the bits you're going to take care of, these are the bits I am. Thank you, Georgina.

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

And in the network, we also try to make sure that we're clear about who has freedom to operate around what, because the network is very big and very sprawly. And the idea is that it should get bigger as well. And so we can't have absolutely everything coming back to the two of us, or we'd never get anywhere. So we've tried to be clear about when people can, you know, take their own decisions about different activities rather than needing to check in for absolutely everything all the time. So when do they need to check in? And when can they just let us know afterwards what the decisions were?

What to agree before samples reach the lab

Adam Smith:

Yeah. So agreeing those things in advance, which actually leads me nicely to your question, Amanda. So before, you know, any kind of samples reach the Biomarker Factory, what needs to actually be agreed in advance?

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

Yeah, so we do have, because in order to get money from people, we have to treat it as a service. So we actually have a service agreement and this lays down very clearly who's responsible for what. For example, even the samples, when we finish with them, what happens to them, or that they endeavour to make sure there's no infectious diseases, you know, to their knowledge, in the samples they're sending us. But I mean, beyond that, the conversations that I have with people go right to the start of projects and the way they collect samples.

And that's where I see the collaborative value of us is that, yeah, your samples, once you've got them, and many of them are historical, they are what they are. We have an agreement. We do what we say we'll do and job done. And then we also have an agreement that we are acknowledged in the manuscript that results from these studies, and often with authorship, but, you know, I would talk about that to decide what's warranted.

I mean oftentimes if people have no knowledge of what they're doing with biomarkers then my team will be acknowledged in there because they are the ones that randomise the samples, that made sure that their results were meaningful. So yeah, so there's different levels of requirements, and there are people that still snuck through and not acknowledged us at all and then come back for advice, which doesn't go down very well, I'm going to say.

Adam Smith:

Do you have a template? 'Cause I'm guessing you must have a template kind of for this now, and that some of that's evolved over time because when you first started out you probably didn't necessarily have all

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

No, in the beginning, people would just send their samples to us and that was that. And then we would use our own money in the beginning. Those were the days. But as the Biomarker Factory has evolved, it's meant that we've had to formalise everything. The document is signed by UCL Legal, you know, they're the people who put it together, and there are no changes to be made to it now. But things are still evolving in the way that we work with people, which is only for the better actually, because we're more experienced now. And now we're able to kind of work up plans with people who want to do clinical trial samples, etc.

So, you know, the remit is widening.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. Thank you.

When to discuss authorship and credit

And Sarah, papers can create their own kind of version of the same problem, I think, as Amanda's just touched on. At what point do you discuss authorship and contribution, and how do you revisit that as a kind of project evolves and, you know, what you thought at the start might not be what turns out at the end?

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Yeah, so I think, I mean, generally early is good. I wouldn't say I do it at the very start of a collaboration because that would be slightly preposterous, to already think about what the hypothetical exact paper is that comes out of it. But as you are generating output and in your mind the structure of a paper starts to form, that's probably a good time to start discussing this, and sometimes it's quite clear that there is a person that has managed everyone else and led efforts, and it's still worthwhile speaking with the other senior people and just ensuring that they're on board with that.

And I think that's the person that has the ultimate responsibility of managing the politics behind the authorship. Sometimes it's a more genuine joint effort and, as a very collaborative researcher, I think joint firsts and joint senior authorships are something great and something that reflects actual contributions and actual collaborative work. So I'm always a fan of that when there are equal contributions. And then probably I also have these discussions with my team members and the ECRs that do the hands-on work on the collaboration, to see.

I mean, I ask, and I'll probably make some suggestions for authorship, but I want people to be happy with that and there's definitely open space for discussion. And then as you indicated, sometimes the paper changes just as you are creating it or in the revision and someone else puts in a lot more work. So it has to be revisited, and I try to communicate that clearly from the beginning, that it's dynamic, but it's important to have those conversations relatively early and then we shape it and it really should reflect the contribution that was actually made to the final project. And I think in general, my approach is be generous with it.

So if someone is giving us, training us on something, doing something small for us, I think all of those things should be rewarded with authorship if that's what they want. So sometimes I'll ask people if they would like to be included as an author, or sometimes if they're, for example, working for a facility or service, they might prefer an acknowledgement or like the grant funding acknowledgement and that's just what they do. But depending on what they do, I do generally offer authorship as well.

Adam Smith:

It feels like not getting authorship is the one thing that can immediately get you a bit of a bad reputation, isn't it? You know, I meet lots of researchers across the day and if you say, what's going on, that'll be the one thing that's annoying them at a particular time, is when they didn't get some credit for something. And as you say, co-first authorship is a great way to spread this around.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Yeah, absolutely. I will say I think there is a balance. I'm also not a fan of gratuitous authorship just because someone attended one meeting at one point some early time in the project and then hasn't contributed anything to the work or intellectually. Yeah, there is a lot of that too.

Adam Smith:

Thank you very much. You know, I'll just say one thing there though.

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

I remember when I first started, I would make my postdoc's cells for her, so their astrocytes, I would culture them from their pups. And she put me second on a paper she wrote, and I was utterly amazed, no one had ever done that before. And I said to her, but how come you've put me on here? She went, look at those other names, they didn't do anything. There you go. Sorry, that was my little anecdote there.

Adam Smith:

No, I think that's an important point, to give that credit. When we did our big ECR dementia survey, we actually had a conversation and said, right, who needs some papers? Who actually needs some senior authorship, who needs some first authorship right now, to divide this up between us? I mean they're only, you know, career papers. They're not scientific ones in the same way, but it's a conversation about who would benefit the most from this, because you're all so senior now that of course you don't care any more about papers, do you? The universities do, unfortunately.

I am, of course, teasing, as I write an article right now about promotions. I'm very aware of that. Thank you very much.

When academic collaborations go wrong

So we've talked about how good collaborations are built, but now let's talk about how they fall apart, when people miss deadlines and somebody agrees to do everything in a meeting and then delivers nothing afterwards. Nathan, without naming any names, has this happened to you? Is there a collaboration that became harder than you expected? Were there warning signs early on? Is there anything you wish you'd done differently?

Professor Nathan Davies:

I mean it's hard to say too much, isn't it, without being quite obvious who you're talking about, I think. I've had a few difficulties, I would say, in terms of collaborations, but they've been across a range of different things. So I've had challenges when putting a bid in, chasing people who just haven't contributed what they said they would do to the development, demanding more FTE, you know, more time, more money, when you know they're not going to actually commit anything like what you're putting down.

And then I've had challenges with PhD supervision as well, where the other supervisor just doesn't provide or doesn't show up and doesn't support in the way that they should. And then I think a big challenge I've had is when you start also collaborating with non-academics as well.

So academics have issues between each other, obviously, with disagreements about science and research, but it's also when you're working with people from other organisations that have different priorities, different approaches, and it's about understanding those different priorities, those different approaches, and how you can come together on some shared kind of understanding. And it's probably politically incorrect to say it, but I've had some quite challenging PPI meetings and discussions where it's been very challenging and junior researchers have been quite upset by the way that they've been spoken to and haven't been supported.

And I think that's important, that when we set up groups like that and work together, that we're really honest and say respect works both ways. We all need to respect each other. And this is the behaviour that we expect from each other and this is what we won't accept, and this is our red line basically. So I've had to handle quite a few in the last couple of years where that's happened, and that's quite challenging, I think.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. It is particularly awkward when it's PPIE because of course they're not held to the same.. or are they? I mean, we should hold everybody to the same kind of professional standard, and they're there to give their opinion, but equally, you know, there's got to be a sense of civility around that, hasn't there?

Professor Nathan Davies:

Definitely. And you know, we're all scientists, we all engage in open debate and are happy to take critique and discuss, and people have different views, but it's about, yeah, I think it's about delivery and how you behave. And that I have had to confront, because I think there is a way, you know. At the end of the day we all want to do good, we all want to support the cause, we all want to support each other. And I think it's just about ensuring that everyone understands that and remembers and respects that. And I think that's important.

I've dealt with that and then I've logged on to my LinkedIn and been talked about, not named but talked about, by certain members of the community. And I don't think that's appropriate.

Adam Smith:

Yep, I understand. Georgina, how about you? Same question really. When collaborations start to break down, have you had that experience? How have you dealt with it? Whether it's people not replying to things or things going awry?

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

Yes. Well, I think it's not at all unusual, is it, for people to either not see eye to eye or have quite different perspectives on a topic. And I think that the greater the diversity of views and opinions, often the more time you need to sort of spend trying to make sense of where people's different perspectives are. And I recognise what Nathan's saying about there's times when early career researchers in some circumstances can feel really bullied, by either senior researchers or by public contributors, when views are expressed very vehemently or when there feels to be personal attack.

So having enough people involved to be able to provide support to all parties, and also having some guidance and some trusted people within the system, ends up being really, really important. So now research isn't just about sort of understanding different disciplinary perspectives and finding a way to navigate that. You also need to be working very much with different individual personalities, which isn't always what researchers have as their main skill, shall we say.

Chasing collaborators who miss deadlines

Adam Smith:

Sarah, Amanda, do you have a particular strategy that you employ when a collaborator starts to miss their deadlines and not respond to emails? Are you just very polite? Are you a polite prompter? How do you do that, Sarah?

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Mostly polite. I mean, maybe I'm slightly more direct in my German-ness. And often when they're close collaborators, if it gets really desperate, I often also have their phone numbers. So if they do not reply to three or four emails, they might get a WhatsApp message as well. And so it'll be polite, but eventually it'll be framed around, you know, what is the problem and the solution. It's not like I'm an angry person who is trying to push them for no reason, but it's often because there is a deadline that was externally set, and so framing it more as a desperate in-need situation rather than angry pushiness, I think.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. I agree. What about you, Amanda?

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

Normally people come to me because they need something, and so if they then don't respond, send the samples or whatever, then when it's urgent I'll just ignore them. So there you go.

Adam Smith:

Well, of course I'm making out here like you're the ones that people don't respond to. Do you ever find yourself being the one who's getting those emails? Sarah's nodding.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Yes, all the time. All the time. I'm terrible. Like, I feel like, I don't know if this is true for everyone, but like there's too much that I'm expected to do, more than I can actually do, by collaborators, university administration, lots of administrative work, supervision work, my team, others. And I've just come to accept that I can never do everything. So some things do fall off the radar, and then I'll feel guilty. I'm quite good when I'm prompted though, then I feel really guilty and then I probably will get back then.

Collaboration clinic: four tricky scenarios

Adam Smith:

Okay, we're nearly out of time, so I want to finish with a quick collaboration clinic. I'm going to give each of you a situation, and I want you to tell me the first thing you would do about this. And actually, Sarah, my first one that I pre-prepared, you've already kind of just answered. So, Sarah, I'm going to come to you first. The ideal methods collaborator was enthusiastic in the first meeting, but they've now gone silent. And the grant deadline is three weeks away. What's your first move? What are you going to do? Replace them? Give them a chance?

Dr Sarah Marzi:

No, give them a chance, polite emails. I have replaced a collaborator about two weeks before a grant before. But I would give them a chance, I would press them to make a decision and also to say, you know, if it's not for you after all, that's totally fine, but please let me know, so I can make a plan B very quickly. But yeah, so I think it's incremental, right?

You reach out politely and then it gets more urgent, and if maybe two weeks or a week before you still don't have anything, then I'd probably send a friendly email and say, listen, grateful to have started this collaboration, but I really need an input, so therefore I'm going to approach someone else now.

Adam Smith:

Would you put a deadline on that? Would you say, if I haven't heard back from you by this date.. And then you're going to stick

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Yeah, I would. I would. Yes.

Adam Smith:

you're just going to ghost them after that, right? You're not going to kind of say, hey, you didn't reply, you just never email them again. They're dead to you now.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Yes, that's.. I probably would, because at that point that's.. yeah.

Adam Smith:

Thank you, Sarah. Georgina, a community partner tells you that the research question is wrong, but after the bid is like 99 percent there, it's fully drafted, it's ready to submit. What's your first move?

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

To try to understand why they think it's wrong, spend a bit of time trying to make sense. At that stage, clearly it's unlikely to be a change. Well, it isn't, but to make the effort to try to understand what the nature of the concern is and to have some kind of plan for how those concerns will be taken into account when it would be appropriate to do so. So maybe for a different bid, maybe later further down the line, depending on the nature of the concern.

Adam Smith:

So is that you try to talk them into it, or you trying to say we'll address it, you know, reassure them and we'll address

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

I mean you can't make a plan to decide how ultimately you're going to respond unless you have an idea about what the nature of the concern is. So my thing one is to understand why it is that they feel that it's wrong.

And it might be that the conversation then goes to sort of just explaining that at this stage in the game it's not possible to change it, or it might be that their concerns aren't really to do with the research question, but to do with some other aspect of the operationalisation of things, which might be changeable later, or it might be that they've just got a different idea that you park and then see whether it's something you want to pick up on in a different project another time. So, you know, until I know what the nature of the concern is, I don't know what the action plan's going to be.

Adam Smith:

Understand the problem, absolutely. And Nathan, a partner institution's costings and support letter are missing 48 hours before submission. What are you going to do?

Professor Nathan Davies:

I mean, first of all, it's not uncommon. That's quite common. I think give up on the emailing them and call them, if you've got a phone number for them. I think call their research office or their finance office for the university and try and get them to sort it out. But also speak to your own research and finance office, because quite often they can speak to the universities on your behalf as well and will do a lot better chasing than I would. And then ultimately you give them a deadline and say, it's getting submitted at this time with or without your costs.

And as soon as you tell people they might lose the money, they'll soon get back to you.

Adam Smith:

Pick up the phone. Nobody does that anymore, do they? It's amazing how many times you phone people now and it's like, what? People have forgotten how to talk on the phone these days. Close collaborators I've got on WhatsApp, so I'll just WhatsApp them. And Amanda, samples arrive with incomplete information and the team expects results in two weeks. What's your first move?

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

The move is we always tell people that they can have their results within two months. So that wouldn't be an option. However, I mean, they'll get the results when they've helped us to do what's right. So I would contact them and say, you need to help us and then we can help you. So I think, yeah, they expect the results, but they'll get them when we've got all the information we need to do them, and I'd let them know that. So that's not a problem.

Adam Smith:

And then they're just going to phone and influence you. Lean on you as a friend. Amanda, Amanda, you can do this, right? You can..

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

We can't, not without the right details, can't, no.

Adam Smith:

Good point. Okay, and a last question for everybody, and you'll all have had this, and I have too. A paper has been stalled for six months, and probably because one of you hasn't.. no, not really.. because one co-author won't approve the final draft. What do you do, Sarah?

Dr Sarah Marzi:

Well, I mean, it depends on how big the contribution of that co-author is. I mean, everybody gets to see and comment on the final draft, but I always give a deadline, and the understanding or the communication is that if you don't say anything by that deadline, I will assume that you're happy with this final draft.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, that's my go-to move as well. What about you, Georgina?

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

I think, if at all possible, try to avoid getting into that situation in the first place. So if you're doing papers within a sort of research programme or a network, make sure that you've got a sort of research strategy, authorship and contribution sort of agreement that's discussed at the beginning, and make clear who has the say-so in any particular paper, who makes the final call as to whether or not somebody's still part of that paper, depending on the nature of their contribution, the timeliness of their responses.

Adam Smith:

Warning signs are often there early on, aren't they? It won't be the last draft that they haven't been quick to respond to. What do you do, Amanda?

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

I mean, like Sarah was saying before, offer them a date and say, this is getting submitted as is. We'll assume you're happy, and you need to tell us to remove your authorship if you're not.

Adam Smith:

Do you have a different approach, Nathan?

Professor Nathan Davies:

No, I think same thing. Unless they have not contributed or been in correspondence at all, then I think I would go with the latter of what Amanda said, that, you know, if we don't hear from you, we'll remove you. But it depends. It's not quite as simple as this way or this way. I think it depends on what the paper is, how important it is, how much their contribution has been, and when did they lose contact, really?

Adam Smith:

Yeah. It also takes a certain level of confidence to do that. I feel like you're all very well established in your career, that you would feel confident doing that. But I guess a PhD student on their second paper probably just needs to go and have a chat with their supervisor. Maybe that email isn't necessarily coming from

Professor Nathan Davies:

Yes. That's why I think them. the ultimate responsibility for the authorship and that management needs to rest with the senior author.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. Senior authors should do their job, right? Step in. Yes.

What makes a good collaborator?

Okay, before we finish, complete this sentence with one line or word.

Dr Amanda Heslegrave:

A good collaborator is someone who would be prepared to meet me face to face to talk through the project, because that's the way that all the best things start.

Adam Smith:

Nathan, a good collaborator is someone.. Georgina, a fun collaborator..

Professor Georgina Charlesworth:

No, a good collaborator is someone who listens and respects others' perspectives.

Adam Smith:

Good. And Sarah, you can have the last word.

Dr Sarah Marzi:

A good collaborator is someone who is trustworthy, fun, and is an equal contributor.

Adam Smith:

Thank you very much, Dr. Sarah Marzi, Professor Georgina Charlesworth, Professor Nathan Davies, and Dr. Amanda Heslegrave for joining me and for giving us the version of collaboration that does not usually fit on the grant summary. What I take from this is that a good collaboration is not one where nothing ever goes wrong. It's one where people can say awkward things early, they can make decisions clearly, they can fix problems without playing games, and make sure everybody gets credit properly. And what all of you have made clear from this is that it's all about communication.

It's all about putting things in writing, having the conversation, trusting and finding people you can work with, and together you can solve problems. And that who you choose to work with is just as important as the impressive names on your application. You'll find links to our guests and their projects, and further information and resources on building research collaborations, in the show notes and on our website at dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk. Do also visit us in the Dementia Researcher community, where you can meet other researchers across disciplines and career stages who are all, I'm sure, very interested in collaborating with you.

I'm Adam Smith, and you've been listening to the Dementia Researcher podcast. Thank you very much.

All speakers:

Thanks. Thank you.