We’re excited to unveil the Solutions Lab, a place where you can submit your questions or dilemmas anonymously and receive thoughtful, experience-based advice from our panel of mentors and researchers. Whether you’re tackling career crossroads, ethical challenges, or research roadblocks, our panel is here to lend a listening ear and offer guidance.
Alaa Gouda asks:
Dear Solutions Lab,
My name is Alaa Gouda. I am a PhD researcher at Teesside University my project involves using bioinformatics techniques, particularly spatial transcriptomics, to enable early detection of neurodegenerative diseases, especially Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
I am currently struggling with data availability in this area. I am reaching out to ask if you have access to spatial transcriptomics datasets relevant to these diseases, or if you could guide me to resources, databases, or collaborators where I might obtain such data.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Jisan Ahamed asks:
I am currently doing my masters thesis project, and I’m feeling very depressed and tired. I have been searching for a part-time research based job for four months and still no luck. I am from a lower class family and small village in India, and I took our a £50k pound loan to do my Masters. I like it very much but the cost of living here and the stress is too much. I have started a job in a restaurant where I work as a kitchen helper, I clean toilets, equipment, dishes, the kitchen and help chefs in food processing. I am exhausted but I have nowhere to go as I don’t have any money or support. I am feeling very drained and stuck, and have even now taken on extra work at festivals. As well as research jobs, I am also trying to get apply to PhD programmes, but they mainly seem to be for home students, and I am also not getting any leads. Please help me as I cry and miss my family. I wanted to change the world with my research, that’s why I came to this country but now I am doing nothing for it, and am just despondent.
Anonymous asks:
I’m six months into my PhD and constantly feel like I’m not good enough, even though I’ve done a Master’s and worked as a Research Assistant, and never had this issue before! I’ve moved institutions to start this PhD and while my supervisor is supportive and offers guidance, I still seem to keep getting things wrong. Feedback is kind, but I end up feeling like I’ve misunderstood or failed to meet expectations, again and again. It’s knocking my confidence and making me question whether I’m really cut out for this. Help!”
Anonymous asks:
I’m co-producing a study with people living with young onset dementia, some of whom want to help co-analyse qualitative data — including transcripts of interviews with other participants. Ethically and legally, can lived experience co-researchers be given access to anonymised transcripts if they might recognise people or situations in the data? How do I balance rigorous co-production with safeguarding privacy?
Anonymous asks:
I’m in the final year of my PhD and was really excited to find out that my abstract was accepted for AAIC last week. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive a Conference Fellowship or travel grant. Do you know of any other funding options I could look into? And if not, what arguments could I use to convince my supervisor to support my attendance—even though I’m pretty sure there isn’t any funding available?
Anonymous asks:
Dear Solutions Lab, I’m feeling lost and unsure about how to navigate my PhD supervision. I have two supervisors, but they’re rarely available, and when I do manage to meet them, they don’t seem to remember what we’re working on. Each time, they suggest completely different directions, leaving me confused about what I should actually be focusing on. I try to be independent, but I feel like I’m constantly shifting gears with no real progress.
I know there’s a postdoc in the lab who might be able to help, but they always seem so busy, and I don’t want to be a burden. How can I get some clarity and direction without feeling like I’m pestering people who already have too much on their plates?
— Feeling Adrift
Anonymous asks:
I really enjoyed listening to this weeks podcast. As a speech and language therapist, I often work with people living with aphasia, but I struggle to keep up with the latest dementia research to inform my practice. What are the best ways to bridge the gap between clinical work and research, and how can I contribute to research as a practitioner?”
Anonymous asks:
Hello, my question is about research setbacks. I am just going into the final year of my PhD, and am running a sleep study in healthy ageing and people with Mild cognitive impairment (MCI). However, we have really struggled with recruiting people with MCI. My supervisor has suggested we collect data from more healthy participants, and stop MCI recruitment. This would let us do ingroup analyses of multiple sleep, cognitive, and dementia biomarker data. However, when running a power analysis it shows we will need hundreds of participants to achieve a power of 0.8, which is not at all feasible (we were aiming for 50 healthy). Any advice on recruitment approaches for MCI, or how to shift your research focus and the problems with dealing with severely underpowered studies or other approaches would be great. At the moment it feels like I have really wasted the last year collecting all this data for nothing!
Anonymous asks:
I am currently a science teacher in a secondary school teaching Biology as a specialism including at A Level. I studied Physiotherapy at university and worked as a physiotherapist upon graduating for a number of years. I have been personally affected through the death of my Nan by dementia and the horrible effects it can have on an individual and the knock on effects on the whole family. I therefore am really interested in exploring a career into researching causes and treatments (rather than just management of) dementia but do not know where to start or if it possible given my past experiences and qualifications. I have a young family so cannot commit to something unpaid if it is a significant amount of hours as I would need income but I am prepared to study and volunteer if needed.
Danine asks:
I am a Master’s student and spiring future leader. I am looking to leave frontline dementia support work and shift to research, strategy and policy. I have faced, challenge after challenge and cannot break in. What tips do you have?