Print This PostHi everyone. I’m Dr. Becky Carlyle, and I’m an Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, based in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics (DPAG for short), and the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Discovery. I’m a new addition to the Dementia Researcher Blogging Team, and the general subject of my blog is going to be starting your own lab; the decisions you make, the things you need to think about, and the lessons I’ve learned. This is my first post, and it’s an easy one; it’s time for me to introduce myself. As with many of the tales you hear from senior scientists about how they got to where they are, you’ll notice some recurring themes. In some places I’ve been very lucky, while in some places I’ve made decisions for reasons outside of my career that may not have been quite optimal. Some of the early choices I made are simply no longer available to researchers at the start of their careers, with significantly more competition now for substantially fewer resources. I think that the take home point is that the course to my own lab has not quite run smooth, but that with a certain level of perseverance, I have managed to make it a reality. So please forgive this initial act of self-indulgence. I’m afraid this is going to be a long one!
I grew up on the outskirts of Bradford and spent my school years at comprehensive schools. I did very well, and I liked science, but in all honesty had no idea that scientist was a job that you could have. My parents were and still are hugely supportive, but the world of PhDs and research was miles outside of our experience. I was therefore, as many people in my position are, steered towards Medical School by my school, and was really happy to be offered a spot at Oxford. It was during those three years that I came to the realization that I really wasn’t motivated by practicing as a doctor, but I was really fascinated by science, particularly molecular biology. There were amazing tutorials on metabolism with Dr Stephen Goss, who had developed early techniques for human gene mapping, with Zoltan Molnar, who was using GFP labelled brain explants to track neurite development, and with Robert Wilkins, who showed that there was no need for a muddled paragraph where an elegant graph would suffice. I loved every minute of it, and after three years and a First Class BA, I was pretty sure that I was done with Medicine, and after a month at Clinical School in Edinburgh, I was one hundred percent sure.
The Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience
Is a leading research institute founded by Nobel Laureates May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser in 1996 to investigate the emergence of higher brain functions.
I therefore took a year out and worked as a Medical Secretary and Project Administrator for an Occupational Health Project for a year, while applying for PhDs. I’ve said it up top, but I’ll say it again for those in the back – these days I’d need at least a year in a lab as a Research Assistant to have even half of a chance of pulling this off. But I was lucky to receive a Fellowship to undergo a PhD in Molecular Medicine in the lab that had identified DISC1, a possible risk gene for serious mental health problems, just at the time that many labs around the world were getting excited about it. It was a huge baptism of fire, and I was not ready for the level of independence that the project required. It took me a couple of years to get comfortable with the techniques and to figure out that with the resources I had available, I couldn’t really fulfil the original project aims. In the end I completed a scaled down version of the original goals, and finished up working unfunded back at home for months to get the whole thing written up, feeling discouraged and pretty fed up. I took a look at job prospects in the UK and they were miserable, we were a year into the 2008 financial crash, and there were not many people hiring.
A year into my PhD I’d gone to the Cold Spring Harbor Schizophrenia workshop though, and I had friends working in the USA that were experiencing a real wealth of opportunity. The Obama economic stimulus package had just been released, and everyone was hiring and doing tons of exciting experiments. I got a job with an Assistant Professor at Yale who loved exciting new technologies, and spent a year throwing myself into learning new methods, trying out new techniques, and losing that fear of doing things wrong that had plagued my PhD years. I was in the middle of a whole bunch of experiments when I got the news that he had not received tenure, and would be leaving. Again, I was lucky that I had built a strong relationship with Professor Amy Arnsten, and she figured out a move to the lab of Professor Angus Nairn for me. Prof Nairn isn’t much of a career mentor (something he’d be the first to admit), but he is one of the most exceptional scientists I’ve worked with. He is a brilliant writer, always asks the most critical questions, and it was through him and the Yale NIDA Proteomics Centre that I was introduced to proteomics. Alongside my partner and now husband, we developed techniques for integrating RNA and protein that have formed the basis for everything I’ve done since. I still miss our Friday afternoon lab meetings where Angus would buy us all a food cart lunch, and we’d spend the whole afternoon discussing our data from the week.
Then in 2017 my partner was offered a job he couldn’t refuse in industry, and moved to Boston. After doing the commute for most of a year, I made the tough decision to quit Yale in the middle of a bunch of projects, and took a role at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School, where I’d use my proteomics knowledge in a very different context; biomarker identification in Alzheimer’s Disease. The lab at MGH, run by Professor Steven Arnold, was a very special place; a genuinely translational lab that ran clinical trials on one side and a basic science/wet lab operation on the other. Through this role I had many opportunities to collaborate with Industry Partners, learn the ropes and human limitations of Clinical Trials, and most importantly, gain direct experience of the heterogeneity and complexity of diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s Disease. It was instantly obvious to me how new developments in mass spec technology could be used to learn more about Alzheimer’s Disease and begin to address this complexity, and the five years that I spent at MGH were inspirational.
In 2019, I had my son. I went to work on Friday morning, and after an emergency induction, was a mother by Friday evening. I was not ready for the abrupt shift in my life, the immediate reversal of all my priorities, and I had a grumpy baby. Those first few months were the most difficult of my life, harder than any difficult career choices. I was just starting to get back into the swing of work when March 2020 rolled around, and when Boston went into lockdown, we were supposed to be balancing two full time jobs with care of a 5 month old child (who by this time had luckily grown out of his early grumpiness), and with a lab that had junior staff seconded to work in the hospital. I won’t dwell on those days, but suffice to say, after 8 months of full time caring for a small child and trying to hold together 2 full time jobs, we were exhausted. We started thinking about returning to the UK, and again, my husband was the first to get a new job. I applied for a couple of academic and industry roles and was unsuccessful, and we moved back to Oxford in 2021 with no job for me.
In a final piece of good luck, I’d kept in touch with Zoltan (of the GFP explants) over the years, and he introduced me to Professor Richard Wade-Martins. Once I was in the UK, we managed to figure out a plan where I could transfer some of my grant money from the USA to Oxford, and fund working 3 days a week while I applied for Fellowships to re-boot my career. We’ll talk about Fellowships later in the blog, but the short of it is that this year sucked, and I was mostly just relieved by the time I heard from ARUK that I had been successful in getting their Senior Research Fellowship. The Fellowship started in late 2022, and since then my lab has gone from being just me and a fabulous Year In Industry Intern, Laura Pearson, to a team of six. I finally feel settled in one of the most interesting jobs in the world, and am grateful for the path that got me here. It’s a tale of mentorship, personal drive, building networks and plain old luck. I hope that with my experiences, I can help others navigating this tough transition, and I look forwards to interacting with you all.
Dr Becky Carlyle
Author
Dr Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford, and has previously worked in the USA. Becky writes about her experiences of starting up a research lab and progressing into a more senior research role. Becky’s research uses mass-spectrometry to quantify thousands of proteins in the brains and biofluids of people with dementia. Her lab is working on various projects, including work to compare brain tissue from people with dementia from Alzheimer’s Disease, to tissue from people who have similar levels of Alzheimer’s Disease pathology but no memory problems. Becky is also a mum, she runs, drinks herbal tea’s and reads lots of books.
