PODCAST · science
Dementia Researcher Blogs
by Dementia Researcher
Dementia Researcher blogs are written and then narrated by the authors. Through this podcast channel, we share the narrations, so you can listen back where ever you get your podcasts, as well as on our website - careers, research and your science. Brought to you by www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk - everything you need, all in one place.
Episodes
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Lesley Cousland - Care Home Research: Getting the Balance Right
Lesley Cousland narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. When eight research requests landed on care homes at around the same time, the team at ENRICH Scotland stopped to take stock. Each study made sense on its own, so what did they add up to for a busy home? In this blog Lesley looks…
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Rahul Sidhu & Prisha Sharma - From Research to Clinical
Rahul Sidhu & Prisha Sharma narrate this blog written for Dementia Researcher. What changes when you stop studying neurological disease through experiments and start seeing what it does to people’s lives? Two researchers who started in the same place and ended up on different paths put that...
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Beccy Owen - Beyond the Lab Bubble: Why PhD Teamwork Matters
Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. PhD life can shrink to the size of a lab bench. In this blog Beccy describes two experiences that took her well beyond it. The first was a week of kayaking, climbing and gorge walking in the Lake District with her doctoral training...
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Dr Connor Richardson - Does Rugby Cause Dementia? A Player-Epidemiologist's View
Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. An epidemiologist who still plays amateur rugby takes a hard look at the evidence linking the sport to dementia. Connor, sets the Scottish study of former internationals against a much larger New Zealand cohort and asks why...
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Bernie McInally - Pandas, dementia and why we need to reach Early Career Researchers
Bernie McInally narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. A panda study that leaves out every panda in a zoo would be laughed out of peer review. Yet for years dementia research has done something very similar with care homes, where a large share of people living with dementia actually...
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Dr Chloe Fawns-Ritchie - When research becomes your reality: dementia and cancer
Dr Chloe Fawns-Ritchie narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. What happens when the health conditions you study for a living arrive in your own family? Chloe, researches why people age differently, and here she tells the story of her mum's dementia, diagnosed at 61. A heart attack...
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Dr Yvonne Couch - Understanding Changes to UKRI Funding Strategy
Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. UKRI is changing how it assesses grants. The plans include fewer and longer awards, distributed peer review, triage by institutions before bids reach the funder, interviews for some awards, and a trial of AI-assisted assessment.…
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Emily Spencer - From Dreading My Thesis to Loving Writing
Emily Spencer narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Plenty of PhD students would say writing is the part they dread most, and Emily said exactly that at her PhD interview. With submission now in sight, she describes how the thing she feared became the part of the job she enjoys most....
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Dr Clíona Farrell - Forty years of dementia progress; how many more to go?
Dr Clíona Farrell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. In 1986 Carol Jennings, a teacher from Coventry, answered an appeal in the Alzheimer's Society newsletter with a letter and a hand-drawn family tree. Her family went on to reveal the London mutation in the APP gene, and forty...
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Dr Becky Carlyle - How not to lose the plot when you lose a postdoc
Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Every good lab trains people who then leave it, and in this blog Becky writes about what that costs the person left behind. The first half is practical: why no one is truly irreplaceable, how record keeping and an electronic lab...
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Beccy Owen - 10 Things My PhD Has Taught Me So Far
Beccy Owne narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Beccy, a PhD student at the University of Warwick studying how tau disrupts ion channels in Alzheimer's disease, is nearly halfway through her PhD and looks back at what it has taught her away from the bench. She explains why research...
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Jacqui Kerr - Returning to My Roots: Visiting a Memory Café
Jacqui Kerr narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Jacqui manages a research network. Most days that means teams, partnerships and delivery pathways. Then she drove north to a memory café in a rural Scottish town, sat down with a cuppa, and found herself back in the job she trained…
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Rahul Sidhu - My Grandad’s Story: Why I Became a Neuroscientist
Rahul Sidhu narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Rahul is a regular Dementia Researcher blogger, usually writing about life as a PhD student and his work on heart disease and dementia. This time he goes back further, to his grandad, who lived with vascular dementia through Rahul's...
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Dr Yvonne Couch - Brain Drain: The Controversy Around Glymphatics
Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Yvonne got pulled into an accidental group chat argument with colleagues about whether the brain's glymphatic system actually exists, and it escalated into a full blown journal club debate. In this blog she walks through the case...
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Dr Emma Law - pTau217 Blood Test for Alzheimer's: What the FDA Clearance Means
Dr Emma Law narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. The FDA has cleared Roche's Elecsys pTau217 blood test to help identify amyloid pathology in people aged 55 and over who are already showing signs of cognitive decline. Most of the attention has gone to what that means for diagnosis…
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Dr Ajantha Abey - More Research Habits I Wish I'd Started Earlier in My PhD
Dr Ajantha Abey narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. In part one, Ajantha covered the practical lab-hacks: experiment numbering, file naming, reference managers and spreadsheets. This time he moves up a level, to the habits that sit around the experiments rather than inside them. He...
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Dr Connor Richardson - We're Still Not Counting LGBT People in Dementia Research
Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Connor works in dementia epidemiology, so when he wondered whether LGBT people face a higher risk of dementia, he assumed the answer was sitting in a paper somewhere waiting to be looked up. It mostly isn't. There is one…
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Professor Louise Serpell - Getting a Grant Funded: A View from the Panel
Professor Louise Serpell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. What does a grant panel member actually notice when they open your application? This blog walks through a grant from the reviewer's side of the desk, covering the short summary, the lay summary, the case for support, and...
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Beccy Owen - Giving Your First Seminar: What I Learned
Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. What if the thing you've been dreading since day one of your PhD turns out to be the best week of work you do all year? A seminar isn't an exam, and the audience isn't waiting to catch you out. In this blog, Beccy talks through what...
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Harriet Greene - The PhD Comfort Zone
Harriet Greene narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Eighteen months into a PhD, everything clicks. The experiments run themselves, the walk to work has a coffee stop, and the days start blurring together. Harriet Greene knows exactly why that happens, and it worried her enough to do...
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Dr Emma Law - GCP Training: Do We Really Need Regular Refreshers?
Dr Emma Law narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Every two years, Emma has to sit her GCP update. Every two years she wonders whether it is actually necessary. This time she decided to find out properly, and the trail led back through the Nuremberg Code to the reason those rules…
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Professor Frank Gunn-Moore - An Academic career, then and now
Professor Frank Gunn-Moore narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Forty years of a research career, told through the three gambles that shaped it. Frank starts with an admission that surprises people: he is known for dementia research and holds no qualification in it. What he does…
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Dr Becky Carlyle - Building Labs Where It's Safe to Fail
Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Failure in academia gets treated here as a structural problem before it gets treated as a personal one. The starting point is that this is one of very few careers where a run of setbacks can genuinely end the job, so the…
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Emma & Sue Williams - A what? A Public Advisor Researcher? You may well ask…
Emma Williams and Sue Williams discuss their work. Emma and Sue have a job title that stops conversations. Public Advisor Researcher. They did not know what it meant when they applied, and two years on they are still explaining it to other people, including to public advisors who now think they...
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Emily Spencer - Overcoming Academic Conference Presentation Anxiety
Emily Spencer narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. With her her viva date set and every working hour going into her thesis, Emily has also just returned to conference season for the first time since her maternity leave in 2023. At the International Psychogeriatric Association…
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Adam Smith - Good Research Still Needs an Audience
Adam Smith narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Publishing the paper is not the finish line, it is where the work of being read actually starts. Adam looks at what happens to research once it lands in a journal, why some of it gets noticed and a lot of it does not, and what...
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Dr Yvonne Couch - Pedagogy For Gen Z
Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Do we actually need to teach Gen Z differently, or do they just need to grow up a bit? Yvonne read a Times Higher Ed article that annoyed her enough to annoy several colleagues with it, and this blog is what came out. She is not...
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Dr Lindsey Sinclair - What Sport Can Teach Science
Dr Lindsey Sinclair narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Is time invested in something really time wasted if you don't win? A comment overheard at a rowing regatta set Lindsey thinking about what sport has given her career in science, beyond callouses and a dodgy shoulder. A former...
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Rahul Sidhu - Weightlifting and Creatine on Brain Health
Rahul Sidhu narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Does lifting weights actually protect your brain, and is creatine the brain supplement the gym world thinks it is? Rahul goes through what the evidence really supports, from insulin sensitivity and inflammation to blood flow, which...
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Dr Ajantha Abey - Research Habits I Wish I’d Started Earlier in My PhD
Dr Ajantha Abey narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. There are already about a thousand blogs telling you to pace yourself and embrace failure. This is not one of them. Ajantha has written up the unglamorous systems he either set up early in his PhD and still thanks his past self…
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Dr Clíona Farrell - An Alzheimer’s Cabaret
Dr Clíona Farrell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. After a long week at AAIC in London, Clíona swapped the conference hall for the Bloomsbury Theatre and a one-woman cabaret called Unforgettable. It tells the story of Tamara, who lost her father to familial young-onset…
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Dr Connor Richardson - Small Vessel Disease: A Quiet Driver of Dementia
Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Ask most people what causes dementia, and they will reach for amyloid and tau. But there is another contributor sitting behind almost half of all cases worldwide, and it rarely gets the attention its scale deserves. Connor...
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Professor Louise Serpell - Football, CTE and the Science Protecting Future Players
Professor Louise Serpell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. As excitement builds around the 2026 World Cup final, Louise examines the darker side of the beautiful game: the relationship between repetitive head impacts, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and dementia. She explains…
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Beccy Owen - When Experiments Fail: Staying Positive in Research
Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Every researcher knows the sinking feeling of an experiment failing after days, weeks or months of effort. In this blog Beccy talks about how she has learnt to stop letting failed experiments dictate her mood, and why they do not make...
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Harriet Greene - How I Found My Way into Dementia Research: Give to Gain
Harriet Greene narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Harriet wrote her first essay on Alzheimer's at 15. What followed was not a tidy line to Oxford. She missed medicine by one mark, took her insurance place in Neuroscience at Queen Mary, topped her cohort's dissertation grades, then...
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Professor Frank Gunn-Moore: Do Cats, Dogs and Dolphins Get Dementia Too?
Professor Frank Gunn-Moore narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Frank asks whether dementia is really unique to humans. Starting with the story of his cat Cardhu, and moving through research on dogs, dolphins, whales and other long-lived species, he explores what…
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Dr Sam Moxon - Why Some Ideas Never Get a Chance
Dr Sam Moxon narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. You develop something genuinely different, cost it, build the team, submit it feeling confident, and then the rejection lands. In this blog, Dr Sam Moxon sits with the researchers who keep watching their most original ideas fall at…
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Dr Becky Carlyle - How I Started My Own Lecture Course
Dr Becky Carlyle narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Becky reflects on creating a new lecture course for second year biomedical scientists, built around the molecular basis of neurodegenerative disease and dementia. She explains how teaching current research, from...
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Brandon Newman - Why data matters in human-centred dementia care
Brandon Newman narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this guest blog, Brandon Newman uses his experience as a paramedic to show how dementia care can be misread when clinicians only see a brief snapshot of someone’s life. He argues that shared care records and digital…
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Rahul Sidhu - Sleep and Dementia: Should We Worry?
Rahul Sidhu narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. Rahul explores the relationship between sleep and dementia, asking whether a few poor nights should really worry us. Drawing on research into the glymphatic system, amyloid beta, tau and long term studies of sleep duration, the blog...
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Dr Yvonne Couch - Academia and the Sense of Self
Dr Yvonne Couch narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Yvonne reflects on why academia can become so tightly bound to identity, especially in careers where work has no clear end point and success is shaped by papers, grants, recognition, luck and timing. Prompted by a...
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Professor Louise Serpell - What's in a name? Amyloid, Amyloid-beta, Beta Amyloid, Amy-Lloyd
Professor Louise Serpell narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Amyloid is one of the most used words in Alzheimer's research, and Louise thinks we have got into the habit of using it too loosely. Amyloid is not a single thing. It is a structure, a way that many different proteins…
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Bernie McInally - Not a good advert for Dementia
Bernie McInally narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Bernie reflects on his work supporting the Scottish Dementia Brain Tissue Bank, using a telephone cognitive assessment to explore a bigger question about identity, diagnosis and individuality. A single sharp comment...
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Emily Spencer - The Hidden Work of Finishing a PhD
Emily Spencer narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. In this blog, Emily reflects on being around four months from her planned PhD submission date, and the amount of work still sitting beneath the surface. She writes about the pressure of finishing complex analysis, using a Gantt…
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Dr Connor Richardson - Learning to Belong Somewhere New
Dr Connor Richardson narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. What is it actually like to start over somewhere new? After nearly a decade at Newcastle, where he did his undergraduate degree right through to his postdoc, Connor moved to the University of Edinburgh in December 2025. This...
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Dr Maria Drummond - What My First Major NIHR Award Taught Me
Dr Maria Drummond narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. There is a stage most researchers never write about: the stretch between a positive funding decision and actually getting started. This blog is about exactly that. It follows the news of a first major NIHR award arriving on a...
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The Report, Out Loud: Listening to Early Career Researchers
This episode works through Listening to Early Career Researchers, the 2022 survey report from UCL and ISTAART PEERs. It captured the views of early career researchers across the world. Work is currently underways to run this same survey again, so we thought this was a good time to recap on the...
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Dr Tatiana A. Giovannucci - If I Fall Behind, I'll Fall Into Torpor
Dr Tatiana A. Giovannucc narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Tatiana's blog is not what you might expect. It is a speculative fiction, set in a near future where AI-driven energy demands and climate collapse have forced governments to ration heating and power, and academics have…
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Beccy Owen - The Trials and Tribulations of Electrophysiology
Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Electrophysiology has taken up roughly 80% of Beccy's thoughts this past year, so she has written about it. Beccy is a PhD student at the University of Warwick studying how tau drives ion channel dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease, and...
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Dr Sam Moxon - Unexpected Things Dementia Teaches us About Time
Dr Sam Moxon narrates his blog written for Dementia Researcher. We tend to picture dementia as a slow decline measured in months and years, tracked through cognitive scores and longitudinal data. Sam has watched several relatives live with the condition, and from a family seat it looks nothing…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Dementia Researcher blogs are written and then narrated by the authors. Through this podcast channel, we share the narrations, so you can listen back where ever you get your podcasts, as well as on our website - careers, research and your science. Brought to you by www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk - everything you need, all in one place.
HOSTED BY
Dementia Researcher
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How many episodes does Dementia Researcher Blogs have?
Dementia Researcher Blogs currently has 741 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Dementia Researcher Blogs about?
Dementia Researcher blogs are written and then narrated by the authors. Through this podcast channel, we share the narrations, so you can listen back where ever you get your podcasts, as well as on our website - careers, research and your science. Brought to you by www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk...
How often does Dementia Researcher Blogs release new episodes?
Dementia Researcher Blogs releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 741 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Dementia Researcher Blogs?
You can listen to Dementia Researcher Blogs on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Dementia Researcher Blogs?
Dementia Researcher Blogs is created and hosted by Dementia Researcher.
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