Podcast – Exploring the New Alzheimer’s Research UK ECR Programme

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 researchers across the world.

Adam Smith:

Hello, and thank you for tuning into the Dementia Researcher podcast. Dementia Researcher has three main aims: to encourage and support people to think about a career in dementia research across all areas of discovery, to create and share content and resources that support people to remain in the field and succeed, and finally, to facilitate collaborations, community, and sharing of knowledge. To deliver this, we work with some fantastic partners who have common values and aims and Alzheimer’s Research UK, or ARUK for short, is one such partner. In today’s podcast, we’ll be discussing the very newly-launched ARUK ECR strategy and their wider program of work, which I feel sure will make a massive difference to early career scientists. I’m Adam Smith, and to help me discuss this topic I’m joined by Dr. Rosa Sancho, head of research for ARUK; Dr. Jill Fowler, an ARUK senior research fellow at the University of Edinburgh; and Professor Michael Coleman from the University of Cambridge. Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining us today.

Professor Michael Coleman:

Hi, Adam.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Hi, Adam. Hello.

Dr Jill Fowler:

Hi, Adam.

Adam Smith:

Rosa, tell us about yourself and what you do at ARUK.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

As head of research, I oversee our funding programs and partnerships with other organizations. So that goes all the way from setting up grant schemes, to receiving applications, reviewing them, contracting, catching up progress and impact of the projects we’re funding. But I also support the team at ARUK in identifying gaps and priorities in the field and developing strategies to address those, implementing any new initiatives and the ECR program we’re launching this week was part of that work. I’ve been at ARUK for 10 years, and before that I was a post-doc and I did a PhD, always in the field of neurodegeneration research.

Adam Smith:

10 years, that’s a long time, and that’s a big job as well. So you must have to have a real broad overview of everything that’s going on across the landscape of dementia research.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Yeah. It’s been really enjoyable, to tell you the truth. It’s a field I feel quite passionate about and there’s so many great researchers working on it. It’s just been really enjoyable all this time at the ARUK to learn so much about the field. When I started out as a researcher, I was focused on molecular biology and now, as head of research at the ARUK, I just get a feel of other areas of research as well, so really interesting.

Adam Smith:

Well, wonderful. Thank you for joining us, and it’s about time we had you on the podcast. It feels like we should have had you on much sooner. Next, I’m going to come to Michael. Hello, Michael. Could you tell us about yourself and your work?

Professor Michael Coleman:

Hi, Adam. I’m a professor of neuroscience in Cambridge, which full disclosure now, I’m not in ECR, but as I was once. I think I remember a lot of what I had to go through and I’m happy to help now in addressing those issues. So my group, we’re about 14 people. We work on axon degeneration and synaptic loss in a number of disease models, including dementia models. I’ve had several roles over the years connected with Alzheimer’s Research UK. They generously fund several projects in our group over the years. I’m a former grant review board member and also a former Cambridge Network coordinator. I’ve done a number of crazy cycling events raising money for ARUK and recently, I chair the working group for developing an ECR strategy.

Adam Smith:

Fantastic. Thank you. In fact, actually this came up in our post-doc podcast we had just before Christmas about the potential benefits of befriending a funder, particularly a charity, so making sure that you give something back to when you take out and things like that can definitely help build that relationship. It sounds like you’ve done well in achieving that over your career.

Professor Michael Coleman:

Yeah, I think that’s crucial. Actually, one thing I will come to later in the podcast, I think, is how important it is for scientists to feel respect, the fact that we’re all people as well and feeling part of a team like that is a huge motivator. Actually, one thing I’ve always found is the Alzheimer Research UK conference is a huge motivating event.

Adam Smith:

Which, of course, we can make a plug for now, actually, while we’re here on the air. That will be happening in Brighton in a couple of months’ time, so details of that are on website, do go take a look. Thank you for joining us today, Michael. Last but not least, of course, I’m going to come to Dr. Jill Fowler. Hello, Jill. Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your career and how it developed?

Dr Jill Fowler:

Hi, Adam. I’m currently an ARUK senior fellow, as you mentioned, at Edinburgh University. So my lab is based beside the Royal Infirmary at Edinburgh, and we research vascular dementia predominantly using animal models and also postmortem tissue as well. So we’re particularly interested in changes that carta astrocytes and if we can target them as a treatment for vascular dementia. So the early years of my career weren’t directly involved in dementia research as such. So they were in related but relevant fields of acute stroke and head injury research. So I undertook my PhD, I took a lab in Glasgow and learning about pre-clinical models of stroke and how we can treat them. So the MRC Industry Collaborative PhD was under the supervision of Mike O’Neill, so I spent some time at Eli Lilly learning about drug discovery as well.

Dr Jill Fowler:

So having studied the acute response to these types of head injury and stroke, and in my undergraduate and postgraduate years, I was interested to learn that these both increase your risk of developing dementia and cognitive decline. So from there, I wanted to learn more about the mechanisms involved, and this is what I started to read up a bit more in form some hypotheses. I applied for a number of different junior research fellowships, and I was fortunate to have been awarded one from the Alzheimer’s Society that involved developing a model of pre-clinical head injury. From 2015 onwards, I’ve been awarded a senior fellowship from ARUK, and in this work I’m interested in the very longer term changes that occur in the brain after a stroke and how they may lead to cognitive decline in dementia.

Adam Smith:

That’s a fascinating career to have been able to make that swap over into the pharmaceutical industry and then back to academia and spreading across different funders as well, and being able to write those grant applications and bring that funding in. We should have you on the podcast again to talk about specifically on some of our careers topics. Well, thank you very much, Jill, for joining us as well. So for those of you listening outside of the UK, Alzheimer’s Research UK is a leading UK charity. Last year, they spent 17 million pounds on research, but they also go further through public engagement, communicating science, funding individuals, big projects and small, and have always put a real emphasis on helping young people and early career researchers. Rosa, why don’t you tell us about your new ECR strategy and what’s included and what are you doing that’s new?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

The strategy came about as part of a wider strategy refresh that we’ve been working on at the ARUK, and ECR will be a key priority for us in the next five years. As you said, we’ve always funded ECRs and supported ECRs, but the need to refocus on ECRs came about as we saw the effect that the pandemic was having when an already relatively small pool of researchers found themselves even more vulnerable to job insecurity, to lack of funding, because we had to pause our grant schemes during the pandemic and not being able to go into their labs in their clinics to do the work that they needed to do and that they enjoyed doing. We also ran a survey at the time, which told us that about a third of researchers were considering leaving research altogether because of the difficulties they were experiencing.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

So it became more important than ever for us to focus our attention on early career researchers specifically. Obviously, as a charity in order to achieve our vision, we need to have a really strong and skilled workforce to help us to achieve the breakthroughs we want to achieve. So we reviewed what we were doing, and we looked on how to improve it. We launched some new initiatives and we plan to, to keep launching some new initiatives throughout this year, and to have an online portal that researchers can access for information. We’ve always had a program that was working really well, so we will continue to do all of those things that people might already be aware of. So for example, grant schemes like fellowships and PhD scholarships will continue to exist. We’ll also continue to hold networking and training events like the Early Career Day at the conference, which is on the 28th of February this year.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

We’ll also continue to host our funded ECRs in our office for networking and training. We’ll continue to have prizes and awards like the David Haaga Award, and we’ll continue to invite ECRs to come to our grant review board meetings as observers. What’s new then, is that with the help of an ECR working group, we added some more elements that were really gaps and that were lacking in our program. We launched a new grant scheme called the Bridge Funding Scheme to help retain ECRs in the field. We’ll also launch a mentoring program and we will enhance the training and events that we offer, so for example, leadership and management training. In general, we will try to increase our interaction with ECRs, listen, what their needs are, and also offer them more opportunity to work with us because ARUK is not just about funding. We also do a lot of public engagement fundraising policy work, and those are skills that can benefit from ECRs as well.

Adam Smith:

That’s brilliant. I’m going to pick up on some of those, particularly those new things in a little while. For now, I think one of the pieces of feedback we’ve heard, particularly in the post-doc podcast we did before Christmas was that we ended up with this, we already had a bottleneck with post researchers, where there were lots of PhDs and then fewer post-doc positions. It’s a funnel that gets smaller and smaller, but then the pandemic just made that worse because, of course, having a year without funding meant that there were twice as many people applying for positions the following year. How do you decide how many positions you fund each year? Is this something that’s decided according to income, or is it a fixed number? Is that something that’s looked at as part of the strategy?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Yes, it’s been looked at. Normally, it’s a balance between income and the quality of applications that come in across all our grand schemes, so not just the career development ones, but also major projects, for example, our pilots. What we’ve decided to do from now on is to prioritize early career researchers. So actually, obviously, it will always depend on the income of the charity and what we can allocate to research anyway. But we will be restricting some funding for early career researchers in the knowledge that we might have some major projects that come through that are of higher quality, but we might prioritize early career researchers because they are really important for us to build capacity in the field.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, I can see that. I know what you mean about quality. I’ve been working with the NIHR on various things and some of their schemes, they just don’t get enough applications even to match the funding available. So anybody who’s listening, and this came up in our podcast last time as well with Mike Daniels, is don’t be deterred from applying if you think that you’re not eligible, because actually sometimes the grants are just under subscribed, although I’m not sure if it’s always the case with the post-doc ones, perhaps. So what are the overall aims for the strategy and how will you know if it’s working?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

So we had four overall aims. One was to sustain the workforce that we currently have and to try to enhance capacity in key areas of needs that we might identify in the next few years as priorities. An example of that, for example, is clinical research. We find that there’s a lack of capacity in that area and we may put more investment in there to build more career pathways in that area; second goal was to make sure that the workforce is diverse and highly skilled; third goal was to increase collaboration across disciplines; and the fourth goal was to strengthen engagement between ECRs and ARUK programs, as I said, beyond funding also for public engagement and policy work. In order to see whether we’re achieving these aims, obviously, it will depend a lot on individual initiatives and activities.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

But we’ll try to keep an eye on how we are helping people to stay in the field, keeping an eye on whether ECRs are progressing to academic and industry posts, that they’re able to secure funding from us or from other funders, and that we’re increasing the opportunities we offer for training in particular, for people from groups that are underrepresented at senior academic levels. We also hope that researchers feel more prepared to face leadership and management challenges as they’ve become group leaders, but we’ll mostly try and seek as much feedback as we can from all of these initiatives and see if they’re working, if they’re benefiting early career researchers, and if there’s any opportunities they spot that we can improve.

Adam Smith:

That’s good. Of course, this year in the UK, we are expecting a new dementia strategy from the government as well. So I think this coming out at this time will also be interesting to see if any of the same things have picked up in their strategy. I know the NIHR for a long time has struggled to encourage clinical staff to particularly working in dementia from nurses and physiotherapists and speech and language therapists and people working in allied health professions to consider dementia research. In fact, we’ve done podcasts on this.

Adam Smith:

We picked it up in our careers week last year to try and encourage more clinical people to consider how they can come to research and bring their skills to that. So if anything, ARUK can do and help in that field, I think we’ll be massively appreciated and open up those doors to those NIHR to bring more of that NIHR money into dementia as well. So I should add, for anybody listening outside the UK, NIHR is the National Institute of Health Research. It’s our version of the NIH if you’re in the U.S. Okay, Michael and Jill, I’m going to come to you first of all, Michael. What role have you played in the strategies development?

Professor Michael Coleman:

So yes, my role so far has been to chair the ECR working group. I think as far back as I can remember in my career, I’ve always wanted to improve the research experience of those who came next to leave that research culture in a better place. I remember even back as a post-doc, writing out all the laboratory protocols for the next group of PhD students who would be starting so that they could make a quick start on their experiments. Recently, my research group and have been developing a whole series of blog posts that are on our laboratory websites about things like dealing with global crises, things like dealing with paper rejections.

Professor Michael Coleman:

There’s one in the pipeline now for dealing with a grant rejection and all this motivational hit that comes with that. So I was delighted when Rosa and ARUK asked me to share this working group. They’ve also now asked me to directly contribute to the mentoring of the group of ECRs, which I think will be a great opportunity to pass on a lot of what I’ve learned, but also, to coach them to support one another to come up with their own solutions, because from their perspective as ECRs and different family and research backgrounds, they may be different from those that I came up with a lot during my career.

Professor Michael Coleman:

I’ve long believed that scientists don’t do nearly enough to work as a group to support one another like that. So it’s a great opportunity to change that culture. I think ARUK is doing exactly the right thing in developing that strategy. Because of that it’s going to be one thing that really maximizes the use, optimize the use of the funding that they put into their research. Not only will that support the ECRs themselves in developing their own research and research management of their groups, the people in their groups, but it will also pass on culture to their own PhD students and post-docs as they go on into the future of their careers. So it’s a great way to really change the direction for good.

Adam Smith:

I completely agree. That’s wonderful. I think we are already seeing that culture change. I think some of that institutional rivalry, a lab rivalry and secrecy that was there a few years ago, it does feel like those walls are breaking down slightly and to create a community that collaborates and realizing that that’s where the quickest wins will come from. Thank you-

Professor Michael Coleman:

There’s there’s far too much of people sitting in their offices or their corners of the lab suffering in silence about exactly the same problems in each case, instead of comparing notes and being able to admit a little bit of vulnerability and share what the solutions are. I think we could all be a lot better off with that different kind of culture.

Adam Smith:

I completely agree. That’s one of the things that in every time we run surveys ourselves, or try to get feedback on a dementia researcher, some of the positives have been how having early career researchers talk about their work and their experiences have really helped everybody else. Thank you, Michael. Jill, what about you? You’ve been involved in this as well. Were you on the group that Michael’s chaired?

Dr Jill Fowler:

Yes, indeed. So Rosa also asked me to take part in the working group where we spent quite some time discussing the issues faced by early career researchers. We tried to think through and prioritize strategies that would help. So the working group itself was 12 early career and recently-tenured researchers, including myself, in addition to Rosa and others from ARUK, and we were chaired by Michael. I guess the first meeting we focused on trying to identify what the challenges were and reflect on our own personal experiences, and then we started to identify some strategies that could help. Following on from this, I met with our ARUK Scotland, early career researcher reps who are Mike Daniels, Josie Fullerton, and Fiona McQueen.

Dr Jill Fowler:

I had a chat with them and I additionally sent around a survey to ARUK Scotland Network members just to get some of their opinions about the strategies that researchers felt should be a priority, and also as a mechanism for researchers to share any further concerns that they’ve had during the pandemic. This, I think, helped us form a useful basis to help shape the strategy. But one thing I would like to say was a number of people got back to me to say that ARUK have always gone above and beyond in terms of their support for ECRs. So this new additional strategy and initiatives are really helpful. They’ll really help researchers at this much-needed time.

Adam Smith:

Sorry, I’m going to go off piece a little bit here, because I’d originally planned to go and ask Michael what the challenges are, but you’ve just mentioned that you were directly asking those ECRs in Scotland there what they came up with, so I’m going to jump between you both. But, Jill, so tell me the top two things that those people in Scotland pointed out.

Dr Jill Fowler:

So I guess even prior to the pandemic, it’s always been an issue in terms of the short-term nature of contracts. So employed as a post-doc on a grant or in a fellowship usually only lasts two to four years maybe, so it’s always fairly pressurized in terms of trying to get to the next step and so on. The pandemic has, obviously, worsened this issue as well. It’s meant that, as Rosa mentioned, there have been less funding opportunities available. So I guess this is where the new bridge funding scheme will be so important moving forward, because we don’t want to lose researchers that spent such a long time being highly trained in specialized fields with technical skills, analytical skills.

Adam Smith:

We had a whole theme of this. I’ve mentioned this so many times. I’m going to share mentioning, it was a big theme before Christmas, this post-doc world of two years, one year, two years, one year and without being able to set down roots in any one place, that lack of certainty when you are looking to get a mortgage or just have a life. So it’s great that that’s something that came up and we’re going to talk about the bridge funding, I think, in a little while. Michael, what do you pick up on as being some of the real challenges that you need to address?

Professor Michael Coleman:

Yeah, I think a problem that a lot of ECRs face is managing people. ECRs are selected to move on progressing their academic research careers because of the ability to manage their experiments and a very few lucky and very talented individuals are also very good innately at management people, but the vast majority and certainly me included, have to learn how to do that and how to take on those responsibilities of being responsible for someone’s career, who’s the people you manage, maybe themselves trying to think about family and building a home and as et cetera, as you mentioned, and they are also under stress. So handling the stress that goes around a group, as everybody brings their own issues into work, it’s a lot to deal with.

Professor Michael Coleman:

It’s, and of course, as you say, at the time, you may have your own trying to build your own family and home life. So it really is also even within the workplace. It’s balancing those conflicting demands of many people at that stage are still doing experiments themselves, which of unpredictable timing, experiments almost always take longer than you think, supervising others, grant applications, conference travel, whatever that was, but it takes a lot of time. It’s a great exciting event, but it does take time and it needs fitting in. I think also dealing with a motivational hit of things like grant rejections, paper rejections, most ECRs have reached that point because they’re high achievers.

Professor Michael Coleman:

They’re not used to having failure, or much failure in their life. They may have had some failed experiments when they have been at the bench, everybody has, of course. But the notion of having a written grant application that then is judged by others, that then comes back to you as a human judgment is where the factors, well outside of control really does come as a shock, but this is the best style that can be managed. It’s the best, kind of the least worst system, and we all have to accept that at some point and live with it and do our best through it. As we say, this all comes at the challenging life stage yourselves, so it’s vital to have that good mentorship and a peer support network.

Adam Smith:

Absolutely, and no arguments here around any of those parts at all. These are all common themes that have come up and things we’ve tried to address ourselves, particularly around resilience and putting your best foot forward with the grant applications and then dealing with the fallout of those. But even then, even if you get the grant, how do you plan the budget and translate that into research and meet the demands of funders and institutions? It’s challenging, right?

Professor Michael Coleman:

Yeah. Absolutely. It’s very challenging. But also, if you can do it, it’s also very rewarding. You learn so much. I found actually the point where you finish your PhD, it’s the most narrow your skillset will ever be if you stay on in academic research, because immediately you are supervising others. You’re learning about people. You’re starting to learn about budgets. You’re starting to learn about almost you could call it the marketing, the going out and selling your research, not selling in a greasy car salesman type of way, but just communicating what you found and why it’s important. These are really crucial skills that every ECR has got to develop.

Adam Smith:

That’s wonderful. Having the opportunity to put these and present these issues to Alzheimer’s Research UK, and then have a funder that’s willing to listen, find practical, affordable, deliverable solutions to help people, I think, is wonderful and great that we’ve got this strategy. Let’s come back. We’ve mentioned the pandemic a couple of times. I think, are there anything else that that’s put a real spotlight on, do you think? Beyond the shortage of funding, what else has that brought up, Jill, that you’ve seen in your community?

Dr Jill Fowler:

In my experience, so a lot of my work involves transgenic mice colonies. So when the labs closed down that experimental side became affected, then when the labs reopened, we had to build up her colonies again. So, for example, in my own experience, I was trying to generate some pilot data for a grant resubmission, and that really took a hit in terms of how long I was able to achieve that. I’m sure I speak for anyone else who’s a parent as well, but for me, there were new challenges in trying to combine working with homeschooling as well, so particularly, in the early days of homeschool, when it was quite an unexpected situation and there was no less guidance from the school.

Dr Jill Fowler:

So we were essentially trying to make up the curriculum for our kids, and I guess, like everyone else, I just tried my best and we had some good days and some bad days. Overall, I still managed to achieve a few things at work because it did give us a bit of space away from day-to- day experiments to do a bit of reading and to write some papers, to think about new proposals. I guess, for me, it was a challenging time when I returned to the lab. So the lab had opened again, and then we had a new lockdown and homeschooling period from January 2021 onwards. So for me, that was more of a challenge to try and supervise students and experiments in the lab and technicians and so on, but back to homeschooling as well. I guess the nicer thing was that the homeschooling at that point was a bit better organized by the school, so we had clearly well-defined exercises for the kids to work through and so on.

Adam Smith:

I think that’s been one of the challenges in the UK, particularly hasn’t it? Because the situation’s been constantly evolving, we go from what you think is one reality to the next very quickly where you can transition from being half-open, half-closed to being fully closed. That doesn’t help when you are building up those mouse colonies and planning those experiments isn’t something that happens a week in advance or a month in advance, it’s six months in advance. I guess if we’d just known that we weren’t going to do anything like that for a year, it would’ve been easier to plan and being able to remain dynamic and then keep the funding there available, because all that time those experiments aren’t happening you’re burning through your salary budget. Of course, we didn’t have the same access to flow in certainly, in the early days in the same way. Thank you, Jill. Rosa, let’s talk a little bit more about that mentoring program that’s been mentioned, because the importance of networks and mentors has come through clearly in other shows and in the survey work we’ve done with, I start as well. So how did this come about?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

So mentoring was identified as a key need for early career researchers and complete credit to UCL and the Scotland Network Centers. They went ahead, identified these needs amongst themselves and set up a mentoring scheme pilot between the two network centers. So they matched mentors and mentees from the opposite center and got really great feedback from everyone at the end of it. What I think worked really well in this pilot was that a lot of time and thought was put towards the pairing of mentors and mentees. So the pairing was done by members of the network centers themselves, meaning that people’s specific challenges in their areas of work were taken into consideration and it was just very effective. So what we’re doing is bringing that in-house to be managed by Alzheimer UK Headquarters purely because administratively, it’s easier for us to manage it than the network centers themselves because we’ll expand it to the whole of the UK across all of our network centers. But we hope to keep the same structure and methods that UCL and Scotland use.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

So we’ll have a panel of researchers from all centers that can help us do pairing of mentors and mentees, and we’ll also provide additional training ahead of the mentoring starting to make sure that mentors and mentees feel quite confident on their roles. So potential mentors and mentees can go to our websites and fill out a very simple application form, an expression of interest they’d like to mentor or they like to be mentored. Then, in a couple of months, we’ll work with a panel to provide that pairing and that training ahead of the mentoring starting. Alongside this, we’re also working on another mentoring program, but looking at group mentoring instead of one-to-one where we have several ECRs working together with a single mentor, which is a slightly different model, but it combines mentorship and peer support. We’re looking to launch that in a few months and we’re in the process of recruiting mentors. One of them will be Michael, which we’re really pleased about. So hopefully, there will be a couple of programs there that will fill this gap and we’ll reassess in a year’s time.

Adam Smith:

Well, that’s really cool, and an opportunity there, I guess, to also look at the work that they did with the NIHR funding program with the writing group support, which has that same feel to it.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

It’s based on that. It’s exactly based on that. Professor Katie Featherstone led that pilot for NIHR, which was really successful, and we were really interested to hear about, and so we’ve been working with professor Featherstone to replicate that for ARUK.

Adam Smith:

That’s great, because that was our office that set those up as well-

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Adam Smith:

No, we’re not taking credit. Katie deserves all the credit for the success of those. That’s really great. Mentoring comes through strongly every time. Everybody who has successfully built those, not even necessarily were mentors, but having different mentors for different things at different career stages, they rave about that relationship and how helpful that’s been. I slightly know about this because, of course, I was involved in the Scotland work myself, but Jill, you were involved in the pilot. I’m guessing the pilot was successful, which is why this is now being adopted nationally.

Dr Jill Fowler:

Yes. So at the end of the pilot, a survey was sent out to everyone involved and I think 100% of mentees and mentors said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with how it had gone, so it had overall been really successful. As Rosa mentioned, it was driven forward by the Early Career Network. It was an idea of theirs and overseen by Fiona Kerr, our ARUK Scotland Network coordinator. So this pilot ran for six months last year, and I guess some of the key aims were to help boost the confidence of the mentees to help them see their abilities. Also, a key goal of the whole thing was to try and boost collaborations between Scotland and UCL as well.

Dr Jill Fowler:

So for example, to try and build up networks where we can invite people from UCL to give talks in Scotland and so on to offer someone unbiased guidance and support as well, which is sometimes a bit easier when you have someone out with of your institution and away from the internal politics and, obviously, to oversee, to help assist and direct their career development within dementia research, which as we’ve discussed is so important in the current climate and just to share experience and knowledge in general. So I took part in this scheme as a mentor as well, which is my first time as a mentor role, evolving from a mentee to mentor. I was paired with a researcher from UCL, so I find this to be hugely rewarding. I met with my mentee once a month via Zoom and we often chatted for over an hour. So hopefully, I can continue this relationship and was of some help, and I think rolling it out in a national way will be really helpful to the dementia community.

Adam Smith:

Can I say, I’ve had the same? So I have a mentee from that scheme as well who’s in Scotland and we meet every month. I completely back up everything you said. It’s been really great. I’d like to think I’ve been able to help, but also as well, I’ve definitely learned something from the mentee as well.

Dr Jill Fowler:

Absolutely. I think it’s a learning experience on both sides as well. Isn’t it?

Adam Smith:

It is. Brilliant. So that’s the mentoring scheme. So the forms you mentioned are on the website now for mentors and mentees to apply. Do mentees have to be part of the ARUK, one of the networks across the country?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Yes. They need to be members of the network centers. If they’re not, they can register in it through our website as well, or by contacting their local coordinator.

Adam Smith:

So just because I’m conscious that not all of our listeners are lab-based researchers, for example. So the local networks, are they primarily lab-based and clinical researchers? There are many psychologists or care researchers or people working in qualitative research.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

I would say they’ll probably fall in the biomedical spectrum, so they’ll be lab-based or clinicians involved in dementia research because that’s the primary remit of Alzheimer’s Research UK. So we will probably cater more towards the biomedical scientists. Michael, I don’t know your experience of the Cambridge Network, but I would say there’s probably very few other health professionals as members.

Professor Michael Coleman:

I think we had a few. I think the other really important thing to say here, I think is my understanding is you don’t have to be an ARUK funded researcher to take part. You just need to be doing some dementia relevant research and have a viewpoint on that and be able to contribute something and gain from it.

Adam Smith:

Okay. So biomedical clinical researchers not necessarily funded by ARUK but must be a member of the network center, which of course is also free to join. You can do that through the website. So if you’re not already a member, you can join through the website and then go on to fill in the mentoring application form. Of course, anybody who’s out there who wants to support this work, it’d be great if you’d come forward as a mentor as well. I really would say don’t underestimate your abilities to help somebody. Although, of course, we know that there are always challenges on time, but paying it forward, I think, is a good idea. So do come forward and that’s on the ARUK website. Let’s move on to a bridge funding and funding generally. So when are you all going to be your funding calls this year, Rosa? Do you know where they’re already going to be?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Yeah. So we’ll have a deadline for junior and clinical fellowships on the 6th of July, and then we’ll have deadlines for pilot projects and PhD scholarships later in the autumn. We launched this new scheme, which is the ECR bridge fund scheme, and the deadline for that is 29th of April. We hope that that has quite a short turnaround to be reviewed by our grant review boards in latest by mid-June, and that will be grants of up to 30,000 pounds. The aim of the scheme is really to enable the retention of early career researchers in dementia research, so we’ll be trying to address particular pinch points in the career paths of researchers. ECRs can use these to cover funding gaps or to complete key pieces of work for a publication, for example. So they’ll need to justify how this bridge fund will help them stay in dementia research, develop their careers in dementia research, preferably by showing that or they are aiming to obtain further longer term funding after the bridge fund.

Adam Smith:

Is that something that the supervisor applies for or the individual?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

We would encourage the ECRs themselves to be the lead applicants. They can request their own salary using this grant scheme. So they should be able to be the lead applicants, but it could also be a supervisee that’s not possible. I think different institutions have different guidelines on this who can lead an application.

Adam Smith:

This is clearly much-needed funding, whereas particularly with the competitions being so stiff or post-docs, and immediately, I assume this will be open to people who’ve just finished their PhD as well, who were-

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Yes.

Adam Smith:

… doing their publications and haven’t yet found their first post-doc position.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Yeah, or where there’s a gap in funding they’ll be eligible to do this. We’ll need to prioritize those people who have quite concrete plans to secure further funding, so something to bridge to, but obviously open to any early career researcher at any stage of their careers.

Adam Smith:

Wonderful. So the initial round of this would be from April and then it’ll be reviewed, I guess.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Yes, we will see how it goes. We’ll also keep in touch with the people who receive this bridge funding, see how successful the scheme was, whether they were able to bridge to whatever they wanted to bridge and then develop the scheme from there.

Adam Smith:

Great. Well, thank you for sharing that and for coming up with the scheme. I think that’s going to help so many people right now and we’ll see how that develops. What about the fellowships? You mentioned that you’re going to be offering some management and leadership training. Is this specifically targeted at fellows you fund or is this a bit like the mentoring scheme that’s open to everyone?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

The fellowship schemes themselves won’t be changing for now, but we will be encouraging applicants to include costs for training to be incorporated in the budget. These can be for leadership and management training, which we specifically encourage, because we think they’re lacking at universities or in other grand schemes, but also for any technical research skills training that people think might identify as key. So these will be for ARUK fellows. Obviously, for those current ARUK fellows who probably didn’t include any budget in their grants for this training and whose universities do not offer this training, we will be offering separate leadership and management courses. As a pilot, we will be offering them the EMBO course, which is quite world renowned, and it has received really good feedback in gaining those really important skills. We’ll be doing this in partnership with the Creighton Institute. So hopefully, by allowing ARUK-funded fellows to go through this training, we will be helping them develop those skills that are actually really important as they become group leaders and have their own people to manage and their grants to manage.

Adam Smith:

That’s great. I can hear the qualitative researchers out there doing their jogs and walking their dogs right now going, “Oh, why aren’t the funders doing the same thing for us in this space?” I hope anybody that funds qualitative research is inspired by ARUK’s position on this, because I think that that transition into leadership, moving to managing your own groups of management is really essential and it’s brilliant ARUK are doing this for that space, but definitely any funders listening that fund qualitative research need to take a leap and do the same thing for those people working in that area as well. Michael, you’ve been successful in finding funding you need. What advice would you have for anybody who’s going to be putting in an application for one of those ARUK calls?

Professor Michael Coleman:

Yeah. So we’ve usually been successful in the end in getting the funding we need, but been far from plain sailing. So I think the success rate differs between different grant bodies, that’s all different funding organizations that I’ve applied to I’m including in that. The success rate does differ a little, but a ballpark figure across different organizations might be 20 to 25% average success rate for everybody, maybe have been a little bit higher than average, but it’s definitely below 50% for me. It’s something we all live with and then, we still live with also, more advanced career stages. It’s crucial to find a way of dealing with, and it’s also vitally important, a very good new trend for people to be open about those rejections, so actually post them on Twitter or other social media and encourage other scientists, and particularly ECRs that it’s not just them that are suffering in this way.

Professor Michael Coleman:

It’s about having the persistence, the determination to go back, have another look at your ideas, take on board any feedback that you do feel is valid, and modify accordingly and have another go, and to stick with the ideas you really believe in. You do get there in the end. It’s something you really have to develop that kind of resilience, but also that ability to look hard at your own what you propose and say, “How do I need to modify this?” The other thing I think from a ECR point of view is never to interpret a grant rejection as a sign that you can’t do good science. In the end, it’s a human judgment. I think it was Daniel Khaneman that had a great quote that I heard about that, “Wherever there is human judgment, there is always noise, and there’s more of it than you think.” The grant review boards do their best in at lease worth system, but there is inevitably, people are different.

Professor Michael Coleman:

Every reviewer, every grant review board member is different and they will all have slightly different opinions. The use for committee is to try and average that out and reduce the noise, but you never get rid of it completely. One of the best things an ECR can do for their ability to develop a good grant application strategy is to see a grant review board in action. So the ARUK has a wonderful scheme for ECRs of being able to observe the grant review board for a day, and to see how that sometimes there’s differences of opinion across the committee, and sometimes they have to give difficult feedback or make difficult decisions. Very, very often the review committee is working under extreme pressure themselves. They all have their day jobs to do, and it’s a difficult task to be able to do that and make those decisions. So it’s really important to see that, and also to hear about what makes a good application. I think you did another recent podcast on exactly that topic, which was really fantastic, so I very highly recommend that.

Adam Smith:

We did. Our podcast from the 3rd of January had Mike Daniels reflecting on his experience attending one of the grant review boards. I think was looking at pilot grants from last year. We’ve also got, I think, at least five pod blogs on this topic as well from people who have reviewed going back as far as 2018, I think, people who have reviewed that, and some of the people who are going to be already approved to review the next ones have already been in touch with us to say they’d like to write about their experiences. So do have a look at our website. If you look, go to the top and search under grant writing, you’ll find lots of resources there; top tips from people, blogs, podcasts, articles, webinars, and more that might help.

Adam Smith:

Thank you, Michael. So, Rosa, clearly ARUK can’t fix all the problems that ECRs face. Do you think there are things that, in your review and talking to ECRs, are there some things that individual research institutions can be doing more from their side to help realize the aims of this strategy? Because you are arms length, right? You can give them money, you can encourage, but you can’t influence what happens day-to-day in the places that they work. What do institutions need to be doing better?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

You’re right. We can’t sort everything and else, but we do need to work collaboratively with universities because they’re the ones who actually employ ECRs. They’re the ones who provide the career structures for ECRs to progress, but universities do have their own challenges, and it’s difficult for me to answer that question because I appreciate those challenges. I know some universities actually do really well in supporting the ECRs as well, others probably just don’t have that capacity. What I would say is that the whole ecosystem, and that means universities, the government, a funder like us and researchers themselves need to work towards a fair research culture.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

That’s not just down to universities, it’s down to everyone working together where ECRs are given opportunities to progress and to grow that a wider variety of skills and output starts being recognized and valued more than it is now and that we address inequalities in the career pathway, because we know there’s a lot of inequality when it comes to senior positions in academia. I think if we could address these, then ECRs would feel more nurtured and more supported in being able to develop the career they want to develop. So some of their challenges will probably disappear if research culture was improved, and this is something we should all work together towards.

Adam Smith:

So you make a good point there about culture and changing that. Does EDI have a place in this strategy, is it addressed?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Yes, certainly. ARUK, we also have a separate EDI strategy, but actually they interlink. All of these is interlinked, and I think a lot of the structures and activities we’re putting in place to improve diversity will have an effect on career pathways. I can give you some specific examples around that. We’re thinking about narrative CVs to allow people to showcase a wider variety of skills and outputs that they have that go beyond their nature of publication and that they were first authors rather than second authors. We want to go further than that. We’re also collecting data on EDI, which we never did before, so we get a really good understanding about the diversity in our field. We’re thinking about things like anonymizing grant applications, perhaps not possible for fellowships, but for other grants, because we really do see gender inequality when it comes to project grants, so trying to understand the factors behind that and trying to address them will hopefully improve research culture, which will in turn, improve career pathways for researchers.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. Some of the things like anonymizing to address that unconscious bias I think is a good idea and, of course, we know that there’s lots of work going on particularly to try and encourage more young people as well and Black scientists, to come forward and apply for those PhD programs, which they’re just not doing in the numbers that we’d like to see. So anything I think ARUK that does through this strategy that helps address that, I think, is wonderful. Thank you very much, Rosa. I think I’m going to throw out a couple of final questions because we’ve been talking for ages now. Honestly, I think this will be a real help to early career researchers, dementia researchers all across the UK and it’s really welcome, so last couple of questions. Jill, what were the biggest challenge you faced yourself as an ECR and what enabled you to get through it?

Dr Jill Fowler:

Well, as Michael mentioned earlier, it’s often when you’re in the early career research is when you start to think about laying down roots and having a family as well. So I’ve had two children during my Alzheimer’s Society Fellowship and I think it can be quite challenging to try and be the best parent you can be and also good at your job as well. Sometimes, you can feel like you’re not really doing particularly well in either role and I have had some challenging times when my kids were younger, particularly. One of them had quite a few health problems and a number of hospital appointments, and I think when your kids become sick, you worry about them.

Dr Jill Fowler:

You’re maybe losing sleep, you’re up during the night, and the knock on consequences of that can be that it’s quite hard to keep on top of everything that your job demands. If you start to lose self-confidence, that can packed on a number of different things. So I think things that helped me through this were just having good colleagues, good mentors and trying to form a better work-life balance myself. Just in more general terms, reflecting on some of the other things we discussed, it can be harder, as Michael mentioned, maybe you’re quite good at experiments, but then you have all these other responsibilities as well in terms of managing budgets.

Dr Jill Fowler:

So you’ve not necessarily come into this to learn accountancy, but you suddenly have to balance all your grant funding and make sure you have funding in place to do the experiments that you want to do and managing people as well. So there’s a lot of things to learn, which is why it’s great that we have these new strategies from ARUK. But one last thing, I guess, to mention is as we’ve discussed, not wholly the responsibility of ARUK, and there is some responsibility of the institution to help with things as well. So for example, at Edinburgh University, they’ve sponsored me a place on the Aurora female-only leadership course, which I’ve just started. I did one day on that yesterday morning and finding that to be really helpful as well. So there should be things in place from institutions as well to help with these things.

Adam Smith:

Thank you, Jill. Anybody who’s interested in working out how to balance a career in research and parenthood should go away and look at a webinar we did a couple of months ago with Dr. Lavisha [inaudible 00:55:44] from Bristol Cardiff? She’s in Wales, Bangor; she’s in Bangor. She did this wonderful webinar where she painted a very honest picture of what it was like raising a child while also doing lab research as well. I think she’s an Alzheimer’s Society Fellow. So do go on her YouTube channel and have a look at that. Michael, I’m going to come to for the very last question. So given your 25, 30-year-old self looking back, what advice would you give to them? What do you wish you’d done differently?

Professor Michael Coleman:

So actually this follows on perfectly from what Jill was just saying, and my biggest advice would be never forget that scientists are people and we’re people first. We’re motivated to do research because of whatever academic interests we may pick up during the course of our education and very early career. But we want to use that to help society, but also, to support our own families and develop our own support network and so on. We have all those same needs. We need to feel part of a team.

Professor Michael Coleman:

We need to connect with other people. We need security and to make, for example, a collaboration where you have to have trust, and that trust is built on those direct personal connections. That, again, has been one of the problems of the pandemic is the inability to have those in-person meetings. We’ve got to get back to all of that. At the end of the day to do good objective research, the research may be objective, but you have to remember you’re a human being, your team are human beings, and you have to say motivated like everyone else. I think that’s a really crucial thing to remember.

Adam Smith:

Thank you, Michael. Very good points to finish on. So I’m just going to recap on the takeaway. So if you haven’t already had a look, go onto the ARUK website where you’ll find their new ECR strategy, which was launched just in the last few days, and you can have a read through that. I think the key points here are clearly some of the big ticket items where the new mentoring scheme sounds wonderful, the bridge funding scheme, the extra training and support that’s going to go in to the fellowships as well, and having this new picture and look and we heard the grant scheme deadlines in there as well, and of course the chance to go and review the grant review boards, the conference coming up shortly as well. I’m sure this is going to be discussed at your conference as well, isn’t it, Rosa?

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Yes, it will, in particular at the Early Career Day, which is on the 28th of February, and the program has been put with this strategy in mind.

Adam Smith:

If anybody would like to apply to be on that mentoring scheme or be a mentor, I think that’s probably going to be realistically UK only, although, maybe mentors could probably come from overseas if you’re going to meet in Zoom. So don’t be put off, actually. If you are overseas and you’d like to be a mentor, then don’t let that put you off applying. That could be a great way of getting some experience of how it is in the U.S., or in other parts of Europe. So thank you very much to our guests, Dr. Jill Fowler, Dr. Rosa Sanchez, and Professor Michael Coleman. Along with the show notes from today’s podcast, you’ll find a link to the ARUK strategy, their funding pages and all the various things and schemes we’ve discussed today. We have profiles on today’s panelists as well on our website, including details of their Twitter account, so please take a look. Finally, please remember to like, subscribe in whichever app you are listening in and remember to subscribe to our weekly bulletin as well, which you’ll get only through our website. If you’d like to just join us to discuss your own research on the show, drop us a line, and you’ll find details on how to contact us in the show notes. Thank you very much, everybody.

Dr Rosa Sancho:

Thank you, Adam.

Professor Michael Coleman:

Thank you.

Dr Jill Fowler:

Thank you.

Adam Smith:

Have a great day.

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.

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