Jessica Jiang
Name:
Jessica Jiang
Job title:
PhD Student
Place of work / study:
UCL Institute of Neurology [1]
Area of Research:
I focus predominantly on dynamic auditory perception in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. I also have other interests that revolve around sleep and bilingualism too!
How is your work funded?
I’m supported by a Frontotemporal Dementia Research Studentship in Memory of David Blechner (funded through The National Brain Appeal).
Tell us a little about yourself:
I’m a Third-Culture-Kid (TCK), in that I’ve grown up in China, but my family’s nationality is Danish. Therefore, growing up as a foreign national in China, my schooling was actually in international/American schools (hence I actually have an American accent!). I then had a proper American adventure as I went to get my undergraduate degree there, before coming back to Europe and choosing to do my MSc and now PhD here in the UK!
Tell us a fun fact about yourself:
Typically I use being a TCK as my fun fact so… maybe something about how I’m permanently cold?
Why did you choose to work in dementia?
When I was living in the States, I read a report about Alzheimer’s disease being the 8th leading cause of death in the US but that there was no active treatment on it. I was also surprised because compared to the other illnesses listed in this report, I found that I knew significantly less about Alzheimer’s disease compared to the others. Therefore, I started reading up a bit more about it, which is when it became increasingly clear that the disease was unbelievably complex and if I was to understand it more, I needed to learn the field and that is when I decided to come to Queen Square, London, to get my MSc in Dementia Neuroscience.
What single piece of advice would you give to an early career researcher?
I think especially in the midst of a PhD, it can be particularly stressful thinking about the day-to-day tasks and the experiments that you need to do etc. However, I remind myself that it is such an interesting and unique period of your life, so with that, take a step back and just enjoy the fact that you’re doing a PhD!
What book are you reading right now? Would you recommend it?
I’m afraid I’m not currently reading a book but one book that I’ve read recently (and perhaps late in talking about how great it is) is Pachinko [2]! What a great book!