Podcast – Getting A Fellowship

Voice Over:

Welcome to the Dementia Researcher podcast, brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk. A network for early career researchers.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Hello, my name is Dr. Lakshini Mendis and I’m a research associate working for the National Institute for Health Research at University College London. So today I’m hosting a podcast and it’s all about how you get a fellowship, which is completely relevant if you’re an early career researcher. So I have a very successful panel with me here today for early career researchers who’ve done that. It’s tough out there, but they’ve all managed to secure fellowships. So I would like to welcome Chris Hardy, Marianne Coleman, Kirsty McAleese, and Jack Rivers-Auty. Welcome everybody.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Hello.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Hello.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Hey. How’s it going.

Dr Marianne Piano:

Hello.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

So maybe before we jump into the topic, we can do a quick round table if you want to share a bit about your background, what you do and what fellowship you’re on.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Okay. Hi, it’s Kirsty McAleese. So I am from Newcastle University and I’m a research neuropathologist. I’ve a junior fellowship from the Alzheimer’s Society. I’m just over one year in and I’m looking at white matter damage in Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr Marianne Piano:

My name is Marianne and I’m an orthoptist, but you can call me an optimist if you prefer. Orthoptist literally means straight eyes, so I specialize in helping people to use their eyes together as a pair and that is what my research fellowship focuses on. My fellowship is funded jointly by Fight for Sight, the eye research charity and also the Royal Society of Medicine, which promotes the exchange of research ideas relating to medical research. And my research project is looking at how dementia might change the way we see the world because the brain and the eyes work closely together and we don’t know that much about how those interactions might change in dementia.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Jack?

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Hi. Yeah, I’m Jack Rivers-Auty Rosati. I did my PhD in the University of Otago, which is the Southernmost university in the world, in New Zealand. I then came over here to do a postdoc in Alzheimer’s disease and how diet might accelerate Alzheimer’s disease. And now I have a BBSRC discovery fellowship, which is their junior fellowship, for the next four years and I’m researching aging and inflammation.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Chris Hardy. I’m a postdoc at the Dementia Research Centre at UCL. I’m really interested in the relationship between hearing loss and dementia. And my fellowship, which is funded by Action on Hearing Loss and Dunhill Medical Trust, I’m looking at hearing in two major forms of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and primary progressive aphasia.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Brilliant. Okay, well welcome all. Let’s get into all about how you secured these amazing fellowships that you’re all on. So maybe we can start off with being like, did you have to apply for many? I remember being a PhD student and just applying for all of the scholarships that were out there. So I’m guessing it’s a similar process, but way more competitive.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah, I got rejected from five or six I think, before I got accepted on mine, but I was prepared for that before I started applying. So it wasn’t as obviously upsetting when you get rejected. I feel like you build up this resilience and you have to try to build up this resilience in academia with paper rejections.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Chris Hardy:

Say it always hurt when I got rejected, but it didn’t deter me from wanting to apply for the next one. I thought I had a nice idea and something I really wanted to do. I didn’t think it was a matter of time before it was going to be funded, but I thought it was worth trying and keeping on trying.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

See I was the opposite. I got my first fellowship.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Wow.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Oh wow.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

I know. I’m sorry. I was as shocked as you. Yeah, so I applied first time for the Alzheimer’s Society. During that time I was waiting to hear if the reviews, I applied for the EI UK fellowship, but I found out that I had the Alzheimer’s Society. So I kind of don’t have any experience on being rejected because thankfully I got one first time. But yeah, not so with the papers. Yeah, I definitely had that sort of rejection.

Dr Chris Hardy:

I’m sort of glad you had some reject of papers. If you hadn’t only quite well.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yeah, no, no, no. Definitely.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

I think the whole room is fuming.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

I know, I’m sorry but it can’t happen. It really can happened. But it was just lucky I suppose.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

But what’s the process? So Jack, Marianne, when you’re preparing your fellowship applications, what kind of process do you go through to make sure?

Dr Marianne Piano:

It can be quite down to the wire sometimes with applications for any kind of funding really. I had at least had experience of preparing grants for senior faculty members within my research fellow role at the university before I applied for my fellowship. But when you’re applying to a fellowship like the NIHR or something like that, having a coherent body of work that can be looked at over a protracted period can be quite important. And because there’s not a huge amount of research looking at specifically eyesight in people with dementia, it’s all quite new stuff. And so, there wasn’t enough stuff to really put together three-year program of work, cause if it’s something new, you don’t know whether it’s something that is worth doing three years’ worth of research on.

Dr Marianne Piano:

So when Fight for Sight announced this one year Primer Fellowship Award jointly with the Royal society of Medicine I thought, “Oh actually, I could apply for that and do an exploratory project to look to see whether this is something that could become more research in the feature. See whether it’s actually worth pursuing or not.” And so it was the first fellowship that I’d applied for, but I had to wait for the right kind of opportunity to come along to suit the research idea that I had.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

I think for me, I’ve researched it. A preparation step that people sometimes forget to think about is actually talking because you don’t want to write up 2,000 words, 5,000 words on a bad idea. And there’ll be senior people in your university who are on these panels who know what a good idea and a bad idea is. And there’s certain unspoken landmines, which are bad ideas that if you include in your fellowship, your fellowship will go into the bin and sometimes they’re explicitly stated. AI UK has one where if you use high dose amyloid in cell culture. We now know that the concentrations don’t reach that high in the brain and so putting high dose on cells doesn’t make any sense. And that’s a landmine. You’ll go in the bin.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

So write down 10 15 ideas, which you’ve got some pile of data for early, well before the due date, and then go talk to these senior people and they’ll tell you the good ones. They’ll tell you the bad ones and then you can aim to get more pilot data for the good ideas, which you can then construct a really good application from. As Maryanne said, it does seem to go down to the wire in the end anyway. So no matter how prepared you are, I ended up on the phone to the accountant at 7:00 PM because I didn’t know that it required a third approval step or preapproval in that time approval. And so I had to Facebook stalk with the whole thing, but she ended up approving it in the rest of the-

Dr Marianne Piano:

Making good friends, with your research finance department is definitely helpful.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yeah, buy them flowers and wine.

Dr Marianne Piano:

Boxes of chocolates.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yeah.

Dr Marianne Piano:

Well actually I think it’s more about making sure that you have got everything that they need to be able to sign you off. Because one of the things that I found, was actually a lot of people just take the research finance department for granted and just kind of do everything super last minute and are just like, “Oh you guys work this out.” So the easier you make it for them to just sign off your bed, then the more likely it is that even when you are sort of phoning them up like four hours before drop deadline be like, “Oh my God, please help me.” That they will actually be able to do it because you’ve done everything that they need you to do.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah, definitely. And it’s such a thankless task. I think sometimes be it working in finance and dealing with people who are like me, who are kind of anxious and angry and wanting to approve things. But I had no idea before I started applying that actually the amount that you’re applying for is not the amount that you need and there’s a huge cost to the institution as well. Instead they needed a job of making sure that they were able to support you and cover the overhead costs and things like that, if you are successful. Say I think giving finance enough time and early notice of what you’re planning to do is so important.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

That actually goes back to a bit about what you were talking about at the beginning in terms of applying for lots of grants.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

It gets easier after the first one and so you do want apply for a lot of grants because the hard stuff, the finances, getting your HOD to say this is a great university and you’re a great candidate, getting all these letters together. There’s so many things that you hadn’t thought of. Impact statements and all those kind of stuff. Well beyond science and once you get those documents flowing then you can start applying for lots of grants with a lot less effort than the very first grant that you wrote.

Dr Marianne Piano:

Sometimes even pre-drafting the support letters so that all they have to do is just sign it.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

The HOD’s not writing anything. You’ve got to write it. For sure.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

I think if we take a step back as well. I don’t think it’s been mentioned that you need to have a sit down with someone. We had to do it at Newcastle, where you had to sit down with someone and show them your CV and actually have that one to one conversation. Are you ready for a fellowship? Because I know a few people who have sat down thought they were ready, wrote a 5,000 word grant application, spent weeks and then sat down and then they’ve realized, “Right, you don’t have the first style of the publication.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Right.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

You said these areas that aren’t specifically said. So, for example, a lot of the criteria, so you have to go through the criteria with a fine tooth comb with everyone you want to apply to. And some of them do say, “And there are exceptions and they do have people who may not be a leader in the field or you should have one first paper author, but if you don’t it’s okay.” You can be fresh out of a PhD.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

They are very far and few between. And from my experience, you have to have one, two, three first author papers. If you don’t have that, go and get your first author paper before you even think about applying. And on top of that, it’s little things like, public engagement. Do you have a little bit of that under your belt? Do you have a little side project and do you have a good project to actually run with. I think the process which we can talk about is it’s very long. I think that’s the biggest thing people don’t understand how long they, mine took 18 months from start to finish. It was a long time and it’s very stressful. But if you don’t have enough at the beginning, you’re completely going to waste 12 months of your life.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

So you need to sit down and find. It’s a mentor, cause I have one in Newcastle.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

And just to build on that, you don’t want to scrape into the junior fellowship because for example, under the BBSRC scheme, there’s 10 to 12 junior fellows and then there’s four intermediate fellowships given out. So all of those 12 junior fellows, only four are going to get intermediate fellowship. So if you’re CVs only just good enough to get that junior fellow, then you’ve got a really tough time during your fellowship to catch up and overtake those other eight individuals to make it into the top four. So having a strong CV in a good postdoc or really successful PhD is obviously so important.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Definitely.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Conferences, presentations, things like that. They all seem a little bit at the time. ‘Oh yeah, yeah.” But everything in your CV counts, especially if you’re going to change. I’ve personally stayed in the same field, but if you were going to change into a different field, anything you can have that can just prop up, your CV to say, “Look, I have experienced in this field. It isn’t new.” It’s part of the development that you have to achieve with a fellowship. But you do need a certain level of something on a CV. And I think sometimes people, I don’t think they necessarily think of fellowship is an easy route, but I don’t think they’re prepared for when they actually hear the realities of what is expected in the application. Some of them should have been told to take six months out. Let’s improve the CV a little bit more.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

And so is it finding sort of that mentor who can give you that. advice is the main way to go around it.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

I was as ready as anyone and I tell this story all the time. I had ID everything. I would see my mentor and he sat me down and he went through three boxes you have to tick. And he went the institution, the institution had the facilities and everything I needed. There was my track record in dementia, so there’s me and then there was my development. And he went, “You don’t tick that box.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” He went, “Well cause my project is human tissue based.” And I want to venture into the MRI field. Anyway, I can do that in three months. He was like, “That’s not enough development,” He was like, “You’ll be rejected straight away.” Now this was three months before I was due to apply.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Right.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

I had already written a project. I just had to completely change direction in one aspect of it. So it was kind of like two thirds of it was ready to go and he went, “Right. You need to either do mouse models or you need to do cell culture. That’s where you need to go with this idea.” So I spent the entirety of Christmas locked in an office, learning the basics of cell culture to try and understand how I can use this to build upon my idea. And thankfully it worked, but if he hadn’t told me that, I would have gone ahead with my MRI idea, which probably wouldn’t have been enough.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yeah.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

So you need someone honest.

Dr Marianne Piano:

And it’s not just about the project, it’s about you as a person as well. And all of us as junior or early career researchers are really bad at selling ourselves.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yeah I think that’s another skill you definitely have to learn.

Dr Marianne Piano:

And therefore that mentoring support is so important. I mean for clinical research, your research design service at your university, if you’re in England, can help you with your fellowship application even if it’s not for the NIHR. If it’s for a charity, they can still support you to help identify which parts of your kind of pitch for you as the person is the right person to do the fellowship project. Need more work?

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

So I was always told, and it’s true actually up until I applied for a senior fellowship, it’s the only time you will ever use the word I and not we, which is extremely alien to scientists because it’s hammered. You are not. You don’t work on your own. You are a team.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah.

Dr Chris Hardy:

So I got told off that in my interview that was successful and actually by one of the interviewers stopped me and said, “You keep saying we. We’re not funding a team here. We’re funding you as a person. Why do you keep saying we?” And that felt really strange.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah it is. It’s uncomfortable.

Dr Marianne Piano:

It puts a lot of pressure on you directly as well.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yeah. I think the English specifically struggle with us a little bit more than other places.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Well that leads on nicely to, I mean obviously Jack, you’ve moved countries and there is an argument that for your career to progress in academia movement is really important. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Well there was just a research paper released on this and it was actually more about the next step, about which fellows made permanent positions.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

And 80% of the fellows had to move institution to make a permanent position. But I know people that have spent in the same university, so there’s always that 20%.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah we’ve got one on the panel.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

We’ve got one on the panel, but I do think it appeals to the funding body to show that you’re willing to grow. And I think and really there’s an anti-family policy and I don’t agree with it. I think people are trying to build roots, trying to build connections and trying to have a family and stuff like that. And I think it should be put onto the past in my opinion.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah. I’ve also stayed at UCL actually since my master’s, which goes about however many years. But I think there’s obviously huge benefits to moving around, exposing yourself to different ways of thinking, different techniques. Having said that, I think it is important not to think about moving just for the sake of moving and if you’re somewhere really good where you’ve worked hard to build up a good reputation amongst your colleagues. If you have collaborations that you’ve started and if you, in my case to work with a group of quite rare dementias and so actually UCL is one of the few places in the world that I could study them and say my research would have to take a drastically different focus if I were to move somewhere else.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Cause you kind of talk about it almost within university moving because you went from human tissue into MRI and cell culture.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yeah. Luckily for me we have on the same floor, we have people who work with that. Which I don’t know if it’s this whole lack of cross disciplines in universities the problem, but I didn’t know a lot of this until I actually started applying for a fellowship cause they need to find people who could do this. But I’m very similar to Chris. So I did my undergraduate PhD, postdoc and now my fellowship at Newcastle and I really felt a lot of pressure to move. You can’t possibly stay here, but I have a brain bank. All the facilities, I work with tissue, the facilities for cell culture and MRI all within the same building. And I think there was a lot of pressure to move. But as long as you can justify why you have to stay.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

On the other side though, it’s if you do choose to stay, it’s very, very important that you have an external collaboration. Because I do agree you learn from different labs. So I have a collaboration across the ocean in California. Sorry, the sea. I obviously don’t have a degree in geography. So I work with a group in California on this research. And I’ve done a lot placement over there, which was funded by my funder buddy, by the Alzheimer’s Society. So I’ve experienced that and I will go back and work with them with the analysis part. So I think I just defied, as you said.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Why would I leave somewhere where I have everything I need and I’m going to have to start again.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

So it’s not always necessarily the best thing for people and just be aware of that and don’t always listen to what people tell you to do. Yeah.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

And give into that pressure I guess as well because yeah, they can be pressured to do that. And how have each of you found sort of that transition from being a PhD, a graduate student to becoming a fellow? How has anything changed in your approach? Maybe to?

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Everything.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

To everything?

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

It’s really, really different.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah.

Dr Marianne Piano:

It’s been a really steep learning curve. I’m not going to lie. I knew when I was applying for it that it was going to be hard work. I knew once I got it, it was going to be hard work. I had a period of about seven months between finding out that I got the fellowship and it actually starting. And basically, everything was just constant hard work from that point onwards. And even though you know it’s hard work, you still don’t really have any idea how much hard work it actually is going to be until you start doing it. And obviously again, I think, you’re being funded as an individual researcher. In my instance, there’s about 60,000 pounds worth of funding riding on the success of my research project.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Marianne Piano:

That’s a lot of pressure for any early career researcher I think, which again is why making sure that you have that mentoring support available is so important, but there’s definitely times when it does get a little bit overwhelming. Especially if you’re doing something which is quite time-sensitive. You’ve got like a fixed recruitment window and you want to get X many people, but when you’re working with people, things never really go quite to plan. So you have to have all of these contingencies built in and sometimes even those, you’re just pushing them right up as much wiggle room as you gave yourself. You need all of that and then some more.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah.

Dr Marianne Piano:

So I think it’s one thing writing and pitching a project and it’s another thing actually doing it.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yeah, I agree with that.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

I think the other thing is that a mentor of mine, Dr. Alison May, they actually put this up and she was like, “This is a pie chart of what you do as a PhD student,” and it’s like 90% blue and that’s just working in the lab and then 10% outreach or something and writing. And then as you progress through career your pie gets chopped up into thousands upon thousands of bits and also they demand the pie gets bigger, so you’ve got more hours in the day then there are in the day.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

But there’s so many more facets to it. It is not just grinding out in the lab. There’s career development, professional development and there’s networking. Sometimes you might be taking on students and you’re managing students and student projects. It’s ridiculous. Sometimes you take on some teaching and your pie just gets divided up and you have to. For me, it took a long time because every time I switched subject during the day, if I go from one thing to another, I’d have to wind up and build up speed and now I’m learning you can’t do that. You have to be able to switch subjects and start writing.

Dr Marianne Piano:

Or you have to get better at saying no. Once I found out that I got my fellowship, I turned around to the people in the department that I was doing ad hoc teaching for. I’m on a research only contract, so technically speaking I don’t have to do teaching, but obviously for your own development it’s good to do that. But I just turned around and said to them, “I can’t take any master’s students. I can’t do any on-campus teaching because I need to make sure that this project is successful, which means I need to devote the amount of time that I’ve said I will to doing the project.” And it can be quite difficult to do that because you knows you as you go through, people start to rely on you for that kind of support and then you turn around and say, “Oh no, sorry. I can’t do that.” And you feel a bit bad about it, but you kind of have to if you’re in sanity really.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yeah it’s too [inaudible 00:23:12] in one. I mean I don’t just jump on a train to do a podcast in London.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

This is the only time work cause there’s no one coming in the office. But I don’t know about you, but one of the massive positives is that now I feel ownership of everything I do. It’s really nice and it makes you feel really good about yourself, that this is working. You get the full credit for it. Well, mostly. But at the same time, there’s the flip side of that because I feel the pressure that I have to deliver now and that was something I never really felt as strongly as even a poor stock. Because if and if I completely screwed up, it wasn’t my name on the grunt. I would just go to my supervisor.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Now I’m acutely aware that I have huge time pressure and there’s already delays and I’ve got contingency plans, but I’m already planning months and months ahead about how am I going to do this and that and get this. Do this problem. And it’s the same with all of the other. Like doing the extra things such as teaching. I’ve had to say no to a lot of them, but you only learn to say no when you reach a breaking point. And we had, I don’t know if anyone was at the ECR Day, if the AIUK conference a couple of weeks ago in Harrogate. So we had a mental health part on there from the pressure that poor stocks and an early fellows are feeling. And it sadly, we are pushed to that breaking point and it’s only when you reach that point that you realize I need to say no. So it’s good and it’s bad, but it’s all a learning curve.

Dr Marianne Piano:

Just for fellowship applications, you’re always encouraged to put in the most ambitious project that you can manage.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yeah.

Dr Marianne Piano:

But as part of that, I think to an extent you do end up however intentionally or unintentionally biting off a bit more than you can chew and it’s a bit of a sink or swim thing. Like you’ve said you’re going to do it, so you kind of have to somehow. But you do end up thinking, “Oh gosh. If I just scaled this back a little bit, then I might’ve been able to manage it a little bit better.” But then if you had scaled it back a little bit, would it have gotten funded? There’s always that question hanging over it really.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

I think as long as you keep in contact with your funding body, I mean with annual reports and things and I think honesty, as long as you tell them, “I was struggling on this part, but would deliver on this.” I think it’s about communication as well because you don’t bottle things off.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

You’ve got to say this area is-

Dr Chris Hardy:

Definitely things have to change sometimes in science rights and they might not work. You might want to go down a different rates and I think that’s right. As long as you are justifying that and to the fund there and letting them know what you’re doing. I can’t see many people having a massive problem.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

I basically refuted my entire hypothesis within three months and it was quite freeing. I mean I could kind of go off in any direction, but I treaded to my funders and they said, “Look we’re.” That’s literally what my mentor said. We’ll send you out to hunt a buffalo if you come back with a limb, that’s all right too. So that was a good. I don’t know if we need trophy hunting as well.

Dr Chris Hardy:

I’m just going to say about that, I completely agree with you Kirsty about the responsibility that you feel as a relatively junior and postdoc commit to all of you. I think that responsibility about this is money that is funding me and my salary and this is money that people might have raised doing marathons or doing all of these amazing things and just wanting to make something good come of the work that I’m doing to sort of pay back the faith that people put in me through this funding.

Dr Marianne Piano:

Yeah, with charity funds and PhD’s. I think there’s definitely that additional aspect to it.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Their pressure is just going to, we’re going to have to learn to manage it cause it’s going to get worse because not only now is it going to be multiple grants once we’re [inaudible 00:26:58] and PIs. That’s going to be our postdocs who are looking to us to keep them employed and stuff like that. So this I think is part of the job.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

We shouldn’t be too hard. I mean, I like to see, what is it, somewhat the analogy that we use in the offices. We’re PIs on training wheels.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

So I don’t think it’s going to be a huge, massive, “You’ll never work in science again if something goes wrong or we fail” We’re never going to fail. We’re always going to have output from our fellow. I mean if we don’t have outputs in three years then there is a problem. Whether or not it is directly what you expected it to be with that niche paper, et cetera. But we’ve got to cut ourselves a little bit of slack as well. And everything we learn goes towards our senior fellowship and we won’t make the same mistakes again.

Dr Marianne Piano:

Cause the point of a fellowship is development.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yeah. Exactly.

Dr Marianne Piano:

The project is just the way in which you develop yourself and your skills as a researcher because you finish your PhD and you’ve got your research skills to be able to design and run a research project. Maybe several. But the learning doesn’t stop there. And so fellowship is just kind of like the next stage of that learning journey in a way because that’s your first step towards becoming an independent researcher and you are still going to make mistakes because at the end of the day you can only know so much and the being able to make those mistakes but have the mentorship and the support to be able to deal with that and to continue is part of that process.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Brilliant. So we’re going to have to start wrapping up, [inaudible 00:28:32], but before we do that you’ve all been brilliant and we’ve touched on these points, really good advice. Is there any other tips that you can share with our listeners just in terms of getting to that next stage, applying for this fellowship? So obviously we talked about the importance of getting good support, getting a mentor who can look over your work. And well first of all, tell you if you’re ready to apply for that fellowship and then kind of support you in writing that up. Anything else that anybody wants to share?

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Time.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah?

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

You have to give yourself enough time to do it. You have to also have to start planning and doing these things a lot further in advance than you think because you have to plan for, if you do get it, if you don’t get it, what are you going to do? Do you have bridge funded in place? So speak to your supervisor about that. And a really good tip I was given by Selena Ray was always have a backup plan or contingency plan in your application. So if N/A fails or the rest your ABCs dependent on that?

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Because then that won’t be funded. So be very, very clever about if half of the experiments fail, you’re still going to get two lots of data.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

So they have to be mixed, but also can stand alone.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah. I remember going to a talk as a PhD student in which they’re talking about how to get grant funding and they said, “Do you really need 12 months to timeline to apply? And I remember laughing and thinking, “Of course you didn’t need 12 months.” And actually that is true. I think 12 months is a minimum. It’s probably what?

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

It’s 18.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Well that was 18 from starting the application to finding out the day that I had one.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Right. Yeah.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

So it was a long time.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

There’s not full time. It’s in the background.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yeah, but full time. It was about, I think it took me about three and a half months to write.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah and I really like the idea. I think one of you had about saying not writing 5,000 words taken out to your head of department. Actually giving them a summary. A page long synthesis of what you plan to do because that’s the point at which they can make real changes.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yeah.

Dr Chris Hardy:

One of the mistakes I made with one of my failed applications was I gave it to my head of department. It’s pretty polished. I spent hours, days, weeks, months sitting over, making it perfect. And then his feedback was actually you should really change a lot of this and it was almost too late at that point to make those changes before the deadline. Whereas if I take in kind of the bones of it to him earlier on, I could have done something with that feedback and that application might not have failed. They probably would have [inaudible 00:31:09]. They might not.

Dr Marianne Piano:

And to follow up on that. I think talk to people like you can never talk to too many people about your research idea. I know there’s a lot of stuff about scooping and people being a bit worried about sharing their ideas in case somebody else does something with it. But at the end of the day, all of the best research ideas need a bit of brewing and stewing and that can take some time. But it’s often the input from other people. Talking to colleagues, talking to people with dementia, talking to friends and family members. Basically. The more you talk about your idea, the more you own it.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Hmm.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

My tip would be specifically about writing. There’s this principle called cognitive ease and it’s the idea that the easier it is to understand something, the more people think it’s true. And so you actually have to boil your ideas down. You’ve got to remember you’re the absolute expert in there. And so you need to boil your ideas down and explain it to a panel that could be MRI experts, cell biologists. They could be purely protein experts and you’re trying to explain an animal model. So you need to boil your ideas down as simple as possible and have good figures. I’m really picky when it comes to figures. A good gain chart and good figures.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Everybody told me to put them in.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Yeah.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

And I kind of reckon to start with the gain chart. It really puts it in your mind how you’re going to structure your research. So I start with my gain chart, which is basically a timeline of your research. It overlaps because apparently you can do 10 things at once. So all the bars overlap with a gain chart.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

It may not be the truth.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

But it does help frame it in your mind. “Wait a minute, if I want to do a two year animal study, I should probably start there right at the beginning.” You know that kind of thing.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Oh and add power calculations.

Dr Chris Hardy:

Oh yeah.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

That’s really important.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Always. Never, ever, ever applied without them in because that is a massive pet peeve of the board. If the peer reviews.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

That’s a landmine. [crosstalk 00:33:08].

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yeah that’s a landmine.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yeah you’ve got talk to a [inaudible 00:33:09] station.

Dr Marianne Piano:

I’d like to present a slightly contrasting alternative to that.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Oh, controversial.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Oh.

Dr Marianne Piano:

If it is a piece of research where there hasn’t been enough done in that area previously to be able to do a power calculation, then you can instead talk about things in terms of a maximum sample size. So for a clinical research study, like the one that I did, my grant application did not include a target sample size, like a minimum sample size. What I did instead was I calculated the number of people that I could feasibly see within the recruitment period that I had allowed myself.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yeah.

Dr Marianne Piano:

If somebody locked me in the clinic room for like eight hours.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yeah.

Dr Marianne Piano:

And then that was basically how I worked out how many people I could potentially recruit.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yeah, there are physical limitations, but if you don’t have pilot data you can still do a power calculation. So as basic scientists out there if there is no limit to the number of animals you have or the number of cells you’ve got, you can still do a power calculation without pilot data using standardized effect sizes like called Colin’s Ds and whatnot. So make sure you talk to a statistician, but I acknowledged totally. If you’ve got a physical maximum number of people you could see, then that’s all they can expect from you really.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Okay. Well thank you all for being here today. Talk us through what we need to do to become successful fellows. So, I’d like to thank our panellists Chris, Kirsty, Marianne and Jack. And listeners you can visit our website to look at the profiles of all our panellists and post any questions in our comments. I’m going to say I think, are you all on Twitter?

Dr Marianne Piano:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Yep.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Yep.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Perfect. Are you happy to engage with our listeners on there?

Dr Chris Hardy:

Yeah.

Dr Marianne Piano:

Of course.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

Of course. I’m desperate for followers.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Great. If we could just go around and share all your Twitter handles.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

Okay, so I’m Kirsty, @Kirsty K-E-M.

Dr Marianne Piano:

I’m @M-P Orthoptics.

Dr Jack Rivers-Auty:

I’m @mere_conjecture.

Dr Chris Hardy:

And I’m @C-J-D Hardy.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

Great.

Dr Kirsty McAleese:

And you win the award. Best Twitter handle.

Dr Lakshini Mendis:

So yeah, feel free to engage with our panellists and post your comments in our forum. You can follow us @dem_researcher. I will use the hashtag ECR dementia. We’re also always looking for people to write blogs for us, so if you have any pro tips on how to secure a fellowship, please get in touch and blog for us. And finally, just remember to subscribe to this podcast. We’re on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Spotify. I’m so pleased. Share and post your review. Thanks for listening.

Voice Over:

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