Podcast – ARUK Conference ECR Day Roundup

Voice Over:

Welcome to the NIHR Dementia Researcher Podcast brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society, supporting early career dementia searches across the world.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Hi everyone. My name is Dr. Fiona Calvert and I’m a science communications officer for Alzheimer’s Research UK. I’m really excited to have been invited to host this special podcast for the Dementia Researcher website, as well as lighter and longer days the arrival of Spring also means that it’s time for the Alzheimer’s Research UK conference. This is the UK’s largest dementia research conference, and we were turning in 2021 as a fully virtual conference with more attendees than ever before.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

20 years ago, the Alzheimer’s Research UK conference started as a network meeting with around 20 attendees, and this year we have over 500 registered participants. Alzheimer’s research UK has always recognized the importance and contribution of early career researchers within dementia research. And yesterday we held our dedicated conference early career researcher day, and in today’s show, we’re going to be recapping and reflecting on that day. And what better way to discuss important early career researcher topics than with early career researchers themselves.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

So I’m delighted to be joined by three highly successful early career researchers who are going to share what they’ve seen and heard so far, and just chat a little bit with me about the conference. So hello and welcome to Mica Clarke, a PhD student from University College, London. Katy Hole, a PhD student from the University of Bath and Dr. Yvonne Couch, Alzheimer’s Research UK, fellow from the University of Oxford. Hi everyone, and thanks for joining us. [crosstalk 00:01:58]

Dr Fiona Calvert:

So before we talk about the day and get into the specifics, I sort of wanted to give you all a chance to introduce yourselves and give us a little bit of an insight into your research area. So I’ll start with, Mica.

Mica Clarke:

Hi. Yeah, my name’s Mica, I’m just finishing up my PhD at the moment and going into a post-doc working in brain imaging, specifically PET imaging and frontotemporal dementia research.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Very cool. And then Katy how about you?

Katy Hole:

Yeah, I’m Katy. I’m a third year PhD student and I’m looking at a flavonoid called catechin, which is found in cocoa beans. And seeing if that can target [inaudible 00:02:39].

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Very cool. We’ll finish up with Yvonne.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yap. Hi, I’m Yvonne, I’m a research fellow at Oxford and I started my Alzheimer’s Research UK fellowship at the end of last year, and I’m interested in the role of extracellular vesicles and post-stroke vascular disfunction.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Very cool. Lots of varied research topics, that’s what we like to hear. So we had early career researcher day yesterday at the conference and it was a mixture of talks, workshops and panels. So I guess I kind of wanted to start by just asking you all, what your favorite moment of the day was? And Katy we’ll start with you.

Katy Hole:

Yeah, I think it was already good, I think my highlight was probably right at the beginning, the talk by [inaudible 00:03:29], gave a really good talk about how being a good researcher isn’t all just about the research, it’s also about going outside the bounds and doing outreach, making sure there’s equity in the lab, getting good mentors and just having an all-round holistic approach to science instead of just focusing on the research. And the idea is a happy lab is a happy and productive researcher, I felt was really important for everyone to focus on even from PIs to researchers themselves.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Can I jump in and ask a question of the two PhD students here? Do you think, so based on that comment, do you think it’s difficult to find a good mentor? Do you pick a mentor for your PhD based on what the rest of the lab says or do you pick it based on what research you’re interested in and how important do you think those two things are?

Mica Clarke:

I think that’s a really good question. I think that varies quite a lot between PhD students and how they find themselves beginning a PhD. For me, I was very lucky to have a rotation year before my PhD began and that gave me an opportunity to kind of combine both of those things, to think about the project itself and my experience over three months working with the supervisors.

Mica Clarke:

And my advice going forward to future PhD students would be to try and take both into account and maybe more emphasis on the team you’re working with than the specific project itself. You can modify your project as it goes over the years of your PhD, but you can’t necessarily change the dynamic of a lab and of your supervisor or mentor, so yeah, I think that’s got a really important part to play in having a good PhD experience.

Katy Hole:

Yeah, I think I completely agree with that. I think it’s obviously important to enjoy what you’re doing and make sure that you’re in the lab for that. But I think having a supervisor who you can fully feels fully supports you, I think is also really important and having mentors that can kind of help you flourish in research, whether that’s in your lab or outside.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah. I think that already great points and I completely agree, I thought that was Dr. [inaudible 00:05:46] talk was the perfect way to start off that conference, it was a brilliant reminder to early career researchers. We get so wrapped up in our science, in finishing our PhDs, in our fellowships and publishing papers, actually it’s sometimes nice to have that reset of, okay, what makes me a well-rounded scientist? So I completely agree, I thought it was just a fantastic way to start the conference off. Mica, how about you? What was your favorite part of the day?

Mica Clarke:

So, again, I thoroughly enjoyed all of it actually. And I really enjoyed the workshops. However, I think my favorite part was the last session of the day, the career session. And I think just because of the variety of talks we received and something as an early career researcher that you don’t necessarily get is an insight into careers outside of academia while you’re still inside academia.

Mica Clarke:

And even if you have no interest in leaving academia and you want to stay in that industry, not an industry, for a while, it’s really helpful to have the insights of how different careers do work and how journal editing works versus how you can get involved with exhibitions at museums, and yeah, the talks were really nice to get those kinds of insights that you don’t get otherwise.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, definitely, and I really appreciated in that panel as someone who was in research and has left to do something different, I really appreciate that none of the careers were described as alternative careers, which I think is a pet peeve of mine, all careers in science are valuable and contribute to the scientific process no matter kind of what stage you’re working at. And Yvonne how about you? What was your highlight of the day?

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So, mine was similar to Mica’s, I love the careers ban and for exactly the reason that you said Fiona, which is that it’s not sort of shaming people who might be interested in leaving academia. So I love that bit but for me I’m going to be the old person in the room and say that I loved some of the first talks and the caliber of the PhD students that were presenting was just amazing.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So to present clearly and succinctly in a short period of time and to get your message across is a real skill. And a lot of mature professors don’t have that and they will waffle over time and their message will be unclear and the presentation will be awful. So, in a sort of as non-patronizing a way as possible, I think that those guys did an awesome job yesterday and there was some really cool research there.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Oh, a hundred percent. I’m always so blown away by the level of these PhD presentations. And it makes us so excited about the future of dementia research, and I think like you said, they would just so kind of polished and they knew their stuff and it’s so impressive. And I also loved that there was so much variation in those topics. We had people talking about inflammation or infections and kind of how they impact cognitive decline, and I think it’s always just such a broad spectrum and it’s just really exciting to see.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

So yeah, I think we covered pretty much all of the highlights of the data. I know that Mica, you mentioned the workshops and I think that that’s something with the virtual conference that can be quite difficult, but something that we worked really hard to try and create these kinds of engaging workshops with breakout sessions. And I know you all attended different sessions throughout the day, so it’d be great to chat a little bit about what those workshops were about.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

So I think Yvonne, you attended the open science session if I’m correct?

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah, that’s right.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

If you could give us some flavor for anyone that maybe doesn’t know what kind of is open science and what did you learn from that session?

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Sure. So I suppose the official definition of open science is to make the primary outputs of publicly funded research, so the publications and the research data publicly accessible in a format that has no or minimal restrictions. So research shouldn’t be hidden behind a pay wall that you can only access from certain institutions. And for me, and for a lot of us, I suspect that’s really important, so here, a lot of our research is funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK, it’s a charity, people do fund runs, they knit things, they bake things so that we can do our research and we can generate data and that data should be publicly available.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So the session today was run by George Vousden, I really hope I’m pronouncing that right. And he works at PLOS as an editor. The idea of the PLOS journals is that they consider manuscripts based on scientific rigor rather than novelty. So they don’t necessarily need your work to be shiny, they need it to be done well, which I think is a great idea. And George had a bunch of ideas about shaking up the publishing industry and shaking up the scientific sort of workplace in order to make science more open, so that we can build on each other’s research.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

His sort of three main ideas were developing new ways of publishing, developing different ways of sharing, and he talked a little bit about some of the problems with impact. So for new ways of publishing and I’d be keen to get everybody’s thoughts on this, because I had a very quiet discussion groups, so anyone, I’ve gotten many opinions on this one.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So for new ways of publishing, what he was suggesting was a shift towards registered and preregistered reports. So the idea of this is to encourage hypothesis driven research, so you register your idea and how you plan to test it and the idea is that once that’s accepted, then you have pretty much a guaranteed publication at the end of it.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

And for me there are a whole bunch of issues with that, which we can argue about if you want to. He also encouraged the idea of different ways of data sharing, so he mentioned a platform called protocols.io, which is a protocol sharing site, lots of early career researchers use things like that, but also things like research gate to go on and look for sort of nuances in methods that might not necessarily be available in the papers.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Finally he talks about the problems with quantifying impact, saying that it’s really hard to quantify impact of individual papers compared to the impact of the journal as a whole. And that moving forward things like the article level metrics, so if you ever go and look at a PLOS ONE paper or a PLOS biology paper, they’ve got this funky little circle thing in the top corner, that’s got all sorts of different colors on. And that’s an article level metrics number and it sort of squashes together how many times the paper’s been cited, whether it’s being tweeted about, whether the news outlets have taken it up.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

But the trouble with that is that they are not really clear how it’s calculated, and that can be affected by all sorts of other things, like whether you have a good media center at your university, so whilst impact factors don’t really work, article level metrics have their own issues that we sort of have to fix.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So overall to get good open science, I think the whole scientific community needs to get on board and change, but I’m happy to get your ideas if you have them.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

I think that’s super fascinating. And I think that it’s something that we talk about a lot as kind of communication officers. And at Alzheimer’s Research UK, we’re committed to open science, but I think it’s that, that thing of fixing or changing a system that’s been around for a really long time in the publishing system, and it’s making those small incremental changes. And how we can go about doing that to have the most effect.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

And I know in some fields there’s lots of talk about kind of publishing preprints, so in things like bio archive, and kind of places like that where it’s, before your paper’s been accepted. I guess to Katy and Mica, as early career researchers right at the start of your career in science is open science something that you talk about within your research groups and how to make sure the results that you generate are out there and available.

Mica Clarke:

Yeah, so I think it’s something we rely on in some of our research, so cohort sharing and being able to access data from big studies like [ATME 00:14:24], a big imaging study that has a whole host of data on different individuals from around the world. So that was one thing about sharing the raw data, if you like, or the summary data, but the papers itself, I think is really important. I mean, as a PhD student writing lit reviews and going through papers, when you do agree to pay, you’re hopeful that your university has got access to those papers and that you can read them, but I think you get past the login and you get into the paper itself, but you kind of have to think for people that don’t have this, but do you have a desire to read that science, it’s a shame that there is a block to people doing so.

Mica Clarke:

And whether that’s because you’ve left science but maintained an interest, or because like Yvonne says, you’ve got a vested interest in dementia research and you’re fundraising for it, and you want to be able to see the outcomes that come from the money that you’ve raised. So I think it is a really important problem in science, and it’s something I personally don’t know enough about I think. I think I’d benefit from perhaps ARUK 2022, I pick open science workshop.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, and Katy, how about you? Is that something you talk about in your lab about sharing your data widely?

Katy Hole:

Yeah, I think it’s something we’re definitely starting to talk about, I think it’s obviously quite new and a lot of it is put on the researchers to figure it out themselves, which is why these talks were, you get someone to come in and talk about it, it’s really useful. We’ve had a couple of my funding body, the GW4 Biomed DTP, which is MRC funded, we’ve had a couple of open science kind of research days and that’s pretty helpful.

Katy Hole:

But it just seem quite difficult and I agree with Mica about when you hit a payroll it’s just so hard and thinking that all these people who support ARUK and other charities, they put this funding in to get the research out there, and then they’re able to look at the research themselves. And I think it’d be really great if one day just everyone could see it.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, definitely agree.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

You’ve also got to think about the wasted resources. So you’re thinking about people hitting payrolls if they’re interested in the work, but you have to think of people in lower middle income countries who are sort of trying to, maybe it’s a very young university and they’re just setting up and they don’t have the funds to sort of subscribe to all these journals.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

And so they’re trying to set up a research program, but they don’t have access to all this stuff that’s been done before, so they might end up wasting [inaudible 00:16:51] time repeating experiments that they don’t know have already meeting dumb because they can’t access them, and it’s such a shame.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, definitely. I think from what it seems like is we could have a whole podcast on open science.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yes.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

One for the future, I think. So yeah, we had a whole host of different workshops, so open science was one of them. I think Katy, you also attended one all about paper writing, which is like a really important skill for researchers and definitely something to refine as you move through the different stages of your career, you get used to different parts of that paper writing process. So what was your highlight from that session?

Katy Hole:

Yeah, it’s obviously really good to learn more about paper writing, I’m currently just writing my first research paper now, so it’s great timing. Yeah, it was a really good talk by, I think it was Elliot NickDel, and he was kind of talking about how writing a paper should be like writing a story and you should play into the human nature that’s really interested in problem solving. So at each stage you should present the problem and then the reader will want to learn more about how you’ve kind of combated that problem, and just keep going back to that.

Katy Hole:

So they kind of had three points, the first was linearity, which is that sentence A should flow into sentence B, and if you finish a paragraph, you should finish it on a problem so that people are like, I want to find out more, let’s go to the next paragraph, keep you reading, because everyone knows that no matter how far you get, reading papers can get quite monotonous and they’re not always that exciting to read.

Katy Hole:

And then the second one was mirroring, which is this idea they should be cyclical, so if you bring up a problem at the beginning, so dementia research has no cure or not dementia research has no cure. Dementia has no cure. And then at the end you should be, why is your work kind of contributed to this field and how is that going to help? And that kind of brings it all together.

Katy Hole:

And the final one is this idea of all stories need to have a profound change, and that you should really emphasize your problem and give the good background to kind of make the reader understand why this problem is such a big issue and kind of using those tips, so that might mean to writing a paper, and make it easier for people to read it and more enjoyable.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. I think the concept of storytelling with our science is a really interesting one, and I think one that maybe makes researchers feel a bit nervous when they first hear it, right? Because you feel like, Oh, don’t want to tell a story. I want the data to speak for itself, but I think that concept of you can weave your data into a really kind of compelling narrative through a paper is really important for getting people, like you said, actually wanting to read your stuff, not just skimming the abstract and then the different kind of results figures, I think that’s a really interesting concept, I don’t know if either Mica or Yvonne you have any thoughts on that storytelling in your science?

Mica Clarke:

Yeah, definitely. I think, particularly as I’m in the writing upstage of my thesis that has become sickly important, because you end up with lots of different chapters that may or may not be connected to one another that you need to somehow make a story out of, and there is a story behind it, and I think as a scientist sometimes it just takes a bit of stepping back to look at how your data comes together, why it comes together and linking back to like Katie said, the problem. Why you are doing the research in the first place.

Mica Clarke:

And something I find helpful for doing that is talking with people that are less directly involved in the research I do, and trying to explain at different levels, a lay person level, but also others in my group who aren’t interested in exactly my research question, just to help me get perspective on what that story really is.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

So useful. And Yvonne, you’re kind of a bit further on, you’ve probably had a bit more experience writing some papers as part of your career, do you find it really helpful to go back and reset the way that you think about writing papers every so often?

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I do. And I also like to sort of take a little bit of inspiration from the way that other people write papers. So this can sound really geeky and tragic. Those are really awesome series of papers by a chap called Chris Dobson, who’s sadly no longer with us, he was at Cambridge.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

And he wrote a series of papers on protein misfolding, and I actually sent him an email because I enjoyed one of his papers so much. It was just so easy to read because of exactly the things that Katy said, he told a story and he had such great flow between all the sections and you really got to the end and you went, I want to work on protein misfolding, it’s so interesting. I don’t, but it was the way he wrote it, I found it so inspiring. And so having that kind of perspective and thinking about how you write in the context of how other people write, is as you go forward it’s really simple important.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

I think I find it really fascinating that concept of bringing some of those ideas, those more creative ideas into our scientific writing, because I also think that we often forget that the scientists that are reading our papers, you’re not even talking about kind of nonscientists, but scientists, all come from different backgrounds. So they maybe don’t have the background knowledge that I have from my writing it and having that story helps bring them along as well into that paper. Which I think.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

And often I would say that writing well is almost described as a, they want to call it sort of soft skills, because a lot of scientists are so sort of data-driven, they’re so, this is how my experiments going to be, this is what I want to do. And then at the end they realize they have to write it up and it ends up coming out so dry and so difficult to read, it’s I think the people with those sort of skills to make it easy to read and to make it flow. I think it’s definitely a skill that the early career researchers need to sort of think about and try to work on and find people who can sort of help them develop those skills.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s where these workshops are really important, because like you said, that’s that typical thing of following them soft skills, but actually these are really important skills for not just a career in academia, but if you ever want to do something different, those are those transferable skills that become really useful. And I think storytelling kind of leads us really nicely into the other workshop, which I think Mica you attended, which was all about public engagement and was a really unique way of engaging the public with your research. You want to tell us a little bit about the session?

Mica Clarke:

Yeah. So it was definitely all about getting creative. So the session on public engagement was quite interactive, it was really enjoyable actually, it was led by Hannah, who I believe is a freelance kind of public engagement in science specialist, and-

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, she’s one of our inspire fund holders at Alzheimer’s Research UK.

Mica Clarke:

That’s it. So it was really nice to hear of a different way of getting science communication out there. So we focused on a concept or a thing called a Zine, Z-I-N-E. And they are essentially miniature kind of leaflets in the style of a kind of accessible magazine that allows you to demonstrates scientific concepts in an approachable way.

Mica Clarke:

So they can be used in lots of different settings, and our task in the workshop was to create one, a very rough draft of Zine. So we got out a pen and paper, we did a little bit of amateur origami to put the team together and then we decided a topic that would fit with our research. So for example, my Zine was titled what is a PET scan? And I decided to, in a very basic illustration, communicate what a PET scan is and how it works. And you could pick a different audience to talk to, it could be members of the public, it could be patients who are involved in research, it could be school students, any audience you want to communicate to. And it was a really nice way, I’ve never experienced before of putting together a concept that you could share with lots of different audiences.

Mica Clarke:

We had breakout sessions, so I went into a group of six people and everyone was working on completely different things. Everyone was probably equally as amateur as each other, trying to put these things together, but it was really good fun. And actually the virtual setting I think worked really well for it. Because you could get out a couple of materials and colored pens and have a bit of fun at your desk.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

I think that’s a really unique concept, and I really enjoy, or at least I did as a researcher and I still do now, it’s like stepping out of my comfort zone a little bit to think about how I talk about my science, I think often when we talk about public engagement, people imagine, giving a talk or going to a school and demonstrating. Actually there are all these really unique ways, and I think some of the things that Hannah does I know are really interesting to bring people in. And like you said, nothing wrong with getting some coloring pens out every now and then.

Mica Clarke:

Exactly. And actually I think, already in our group a few people from my team decided to go to the public engagement workshop, because we’re very keen to get involved with that. And we form part of a team called FDD talk and we have a website that’s kind of targeting public engagement and we were already thinking, how can we use these scenes? Can we produce different ones for patient support groups or for pint of science events at different in the year and things like that. So yeah, lots of useful tips taken away from that session.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

That’s great, that’s what we love to hear, that not only are they useful within the conference, but you can actually kind of implement them into your wider work as researchers. That’s great. I think the final workshop was all about fellowship applications. And Yvonne you are one of our Alzheimer’s Research UK fellows yourself, so you sort of been through that process. So I guess kind of just really briefly, what’s your biggest tip for fellowship applications, either from what you heard in the session or from your own experience applying?

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So it’d be really hard to pin it down and actually Francis and Daniel did a great job of covering some of the basics. So if you want to go and watch them, try and go and watch them again, because they were awesome. But I think I’d just say, start by thinking about your proposal and make your proposal really obvious. That sounds dumb, but I know you know why your research is important, but I don’t know and neither did the panel, neither did the reviewers. So make it really obvious and handhold them through it.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

And then my second one would be just, don’t apply for a fellowship because your supervisor told you to do it. Apply for one because it’s what you want, because it’s the right time and the right place and the right environment for you to establish your independence, because taking those two approaches will mean that you’ll be able to get your passion and your love of research across. If you’re doing it because somebody else says you should, then you’re not going to have that love for what you do.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, I think that’s really important, I think it’s something, again, that kind of leads into that discussion we were having earlier around different career paths. Sometimes we follow these career paths as researchers because that’s sort of what’s done, Oh, you finished your undergrad, you’ve done a masters, now it’s time to do a PhD. Oh, you got to do a postdoc and that is fellowship, but it is, it’s about finding that thing that you love and you’re passionate about and-

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah, very much so, very much so.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah. And do you think, is there anything that you wish you’d have known when you went through that process of fellowship applications that you didn’t?

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Probably not that they didn’t cover, I would say that when you get rejections, they are more crushing than you view up at four. So Daniel did say in his fellowship presentation that he went off and cried and I have spent many, many hours in offices crying, thinking… and it feels so childish to do it, because it’s like, Oh, nobody likes me, nobody likes what I do. But it’s not that, it’s an opportunity, in retrospect, it’s an opportunity for you to learn and for you to think about how you’ve presented your research and how you present it better or how you could bring different ideas in. But at the time it is very crushing. And I think if you are an early career researcher, you should just be a bit mentally prepared for that.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah. I also think it makes a huge difference to hear people at later stages of their career talk about those rejections to normalize it as part of this process. Unfortunately as much as we wish it wasn’t rejection is a big part of academic life and normalizing feeling bad about it as well.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah, very much… That was why I was so pleased that Daniel said that he was really upset when he got rejected, because it is crushing, because you tend to put your sort of heart and soul into these applications. And like you say, that’s why it was kind of nice in the careers talks for people to say, actually, you don’t have to do this, this is not the path that you have to take if you don’t want to do it, and if you don’t love it, because I think if you don’t love it, it’s not a cheerful way to go, but if you do love it, it’s great.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, definitely. And I guess to kind of Katy and Mica, as PhD students at that first kind of rung on the ladder of academic careers, how was it and why do you think it’s so important to have and hear from a variety of different careers in science? Like the one that we had on early career researcher day.

Katy Hole:

Yeah I thought it was really good and I think it’s really nice as well, because a lot of these kind of alternative careers sessions, his industry, you’re not going into academia, so you’re going into industry, obviously, that’s the choice. So it’s really nice to see such a varied collection and see that you really can do pretty much anything if you want to do it. And kind of seeing that you can be a museum curator, I just, that’s not even something I’d ever considered would be a thing. And policy and a startup, which kind of seems mad, I think it’s just really interesting to see all the things you can do and it’s not just academia or industry, I think it’s really good to see.

Mica Clarke:

Totally agree. I think I also found, from both the fellowships workshop which I attended within the careers panel, it was just so helpful as an early career researcher. So from the fellowships workshop learning that it’s not one straight trajectory and Prof. Katy Lenon for example was talking on the panel and she said, she’s actually never received a fellowship. And for her, there are other ways to become a PI and eventually a prof by pilot schemes and other grants that you can apply for that aren’t necessarily your own autonomous fellowship. And that’s reassuring, because there’s lots of postdocs in academia and not everybody’s going to follow the same path to get to the top.

Mica Clarke:

And then also, yeah, the careers session at the end was just brilliant. I think I agree with Yvonne and Katy that it wasn’t presented as alternative careers, that these are your other resort if you don’t make it, it’s not that at all, it was from people that had actively chosen to leave academia because of their interests. And I think there isn’t only one step after a PhD of going into a post-doc, there are plenty of steps you can take and jobs I didn’t know existed. So that was really, really exciting to hear about.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah. I think the jobs I didn’t know existed definitely resonates with me when I was coming towards the end of my PhD, I knew that I didn’t want to stay kind of working in a lab, but I sort of just had no idea what else was out there. And I remember going to my career service and being like, I want a different job, but I don’t even know what jobs there are. And that conversation was just mind blowing, there’s so much out there.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

And I know that, think the dementia researcher podcast, they did a careers week and they have lots of different podcasts on the site about different careers and people that have kind of worked in different areas of science. So I think I agree with you all, it’s just so important to remind people that, like you said, not all pods are linear and, or everyone is path is individual and you don’t need to compare yourself to someone else, you just got to do your own thing.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

So I guess kind of wrapping up towards the end, the main conference has started today, it’s Tuesday. What are you most looking forward to? And are you presenting? Feel free to plug your talk, your posters, Katy, we’ll start with you.

Katy Hole:

Thanks. Yeah, so actually, I missed this morning, so I’m really looking forward to going back on and seeing that about drug discovery. And I’m not sure if that initial talk will be up on demand, but I’ve seen a lot of stuff on Twitter about how it was a really good talk with someone who’d experienced dementia in the family. And that’s, so I’d really like to see that if that’s possible. I do have a poster, it’s 7.6 and it’s on treating the [inaudible 00:34:46] with a Catechin or dietary flavonoids and the changes we saw in [inaudible 00:34:52] in that, and kind of trying to understand the mechanisms of it. So to go check it out.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Good plugging that. Yeah. So, we’re trying to make all of those talks available on demand, so you should be able to watch them back anyone that’s registered, the perk of being virtual is you don’t all have to be sat in the conference hall at the same time. So, yeah, those should be on demand and yeah, definitely check out the posters, I think that the good thing is we have a nice interactive platform for those. So Yvonne, how about you? What are you most looking forward to and what are you plugging for the rest of the conference?

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So I only started my fellowship at the end of last year, because of COVID, I’ve only got 50% of the lab time at the moment, so I really have no data, but I would like to do a shout out to anyone interested in stroke or extracellular vesicles or vascular dementia, because I’m a solo researcher, so I’m always looking out for new collaborators. Because I’m new to sort of the vascular dementia field, I’m really just looking forward to seeing what’s out there and who’s doing what.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, I think that’s the nice thing about these conferences is they’re so varied and we have such kind of wide variety of topics as you can kind of dip into those fields that are new to you. We also on the platform have a kind of matching system, so you can put in topics that you’re interested in and get matched with people sort of like speed dating, but for researchers in their interested topics. Mica, how about you?

Mica Clarke:

Yeah, I think one thing I really like about ARUK is having this balance between the ECR day, early career research day, and then the main conference itself. There’s such a range of topics covered and they’re nicely grouped into different sessions, so you can be quite focused on the talks that are most relevant for you. I do have a poster which is poster 4.5, I am talking while presenting work on inflammatory PET imaging and genetic frontal temporal dementia.

Mica Clarke:

And what I really like about this virtual platform is it seems very interactive. Of course I think we all miss the networking aspect of conferences and the benefits you get from talking to people. But as far as I can tell is a pretty good system for kind of posting questions on people’s posters and getting involved in some discussion anyway, so I’m looking forward to a bit of that this week.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

Yeah, definitely. I think we’ve got so many exciting sessions coming up. I’m really interested to listen into the one all about kind of viruses and how viral infections relate to dementia. I think something [inaudible 00:37:27] on our mind a lot more this year. And I just think is a really kind of fascinating area of research, that maybe we don’t kind of dip into enough. So I’m really intrigued to listen into that.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

And we have a whole host of other early career researchers presenting throughout the conference, and like you said, just the posters, I’m always amazed by posters and how visually exciting people make that posters to look. So I love being able to go and see those.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

So it’s time to end today’s podcast recording. I just want to thank our panelists Mica, Katy and Yvonne. You’ve been fantastic, I’ve enjoyed chatting to you a little bit more, I wish we could have spent three hours on this podcast talking about all these things. If you would like to see kind of more about the conference and you’re on Twitter, you can check out the hashtag, #ARUKconf21.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

And if you registered to the conference, but there were sessions you can’t attend, then we do have an on demand function. So you’ll be able to watch back to different sections, and I know some of the videos at the start of the conference like people who had family connections to dementia, and we had a summary of our 2020 year Alzheimer’s research UK, we’ll be looking to put those on the website so that they can be shared more widely.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

The team are going to be writing up blogs for our supporters and followers that you can find on our website. We have profiles of all the panelists today on the website, including details of that Twitter account, so you can follow along and find out a bit more about their research. If any of our listeners have any questions either about what we’ve chatted about today, or more kind of wider questions about dementia research, the dementia researcher has a really busy and active WhatsApp community group, there’s fortnightly themed discussions to talk about topics from the podcast.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

And you can find details on how to join that on the website, so I think that’s going to be one of them in a week’s time, all about the ARUK, Alzheimer’s Research UK conference. So hopefully some people can join us there.

Dr Fiona Calvert:

And finally, please remember to like, subscribe and leave a review of this podcast through our website, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, SoundCloud, all the other places you can find podcasts, I know everyone gets them from lots of different places. And thank you again, Katy Mica and Yvonne.

Mica Clarke:

Thank you very much for having us.

Katy Hole:

Thank you.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Thanks.

Voice Over:

Brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society. Supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

END