Podcast – Collaborative work in non-cognitive aspects of Alzheimer’s disease

Voice Over:

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

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Hello, and welcome to our podcast recording for the NIHR Dementia Researcher website. This week, we’ll be discussing non-cognitive aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, particularly focusing on social withdrawal.

James Datchler:

Hi, I’m James Datchler. I’m currently an Alzheimer’s Society fellow and I work at Durham University.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Hi, I’m Eleftheria Pervolaraki and I’m currently a postdoc fellow at the University of Leeds.

Stephen Hall:

Hello, I’m Dr. Stephen Hall, and I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of York.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Thank you very much for joining us today. Maybe let’s start with a brief background from all of you.

Stephen Hall:

Hello, yeah. I’m Stephen. I’m the bit of the oddball here really, because I primarily work in epilepsy at the moment, but hopefully will be transitioning across into Alzheimer’s research imminently.

Stephen Hall:

I work a lot with in vitro electrophysiology. So we look at rhythms and we look at electrical signals in the brain, with a particular focus on sleep and cognition and also epilepsy. And we try and understand what’s going on in those situations and try and put them right if need be.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay, and what model organisms do you use?

Stephen Hall:

So we use mice, rats, and also we do a bit of human work as well with MEG studies.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Great, and James?

James Datchler:

So I did my PhD in Cardiff on neocortical plasticity mechanisms and behavior in mouse models. I got my PhD in 2010. I moved to Leeds in 2011, where I continued to use mouse models, but got more interested in the neural mechanisms of social behavior and particularly when social behavior goes wrong. So, disorders that particularly affect social behavior like autism.

James Datchler:

So, I was very lucky at Leeds, I managed to get some money to become independent within my first postdoc. And that allowed me to develop some new strands of research, so in vitro electrophysiology, in vivo electrophysiology, molecular biology processes, a little bit of MRI. And then I transitioned my knowledge of social behavior into dementia, when I got my Alzheimer’s Society fellowship, which took me to Durham University where I am now.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Great, and Eleftheria?

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

I’m primarily a postdoc fellow, a research fellow in the University of Leeds. I’m involved in the current project through the study of understanding how the heart functions. Through my work in the University of Leeds and my connection to departments such as physics and medicine, I had the opportunity to develop imaging protocols using primarily MRI to study the function and the structure of the heart.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

So, using such techniques, I tried to progress the project from a different aspect and different angle and see how does the heart is involved during dementia and what the effects are to the brain.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay, great. So you’re all from different places, York, Durham and Leeds, and you’re all basically coming together to write a grant together. Is that right? Maybe you could talk about how you’re all involved in the research.

James Datchler:

I guess I’m the linchpin in this. I got my fellowship, but many years before that, I was working with Eleftheria. We did our PhDs in the same lab, and we had been working on my autism project, particularly trying to advance imaging techniques. Something called diffusion tensor MRI.

James Datchler:

So as part of my fellowship, Eleftheria is a named mentor. So we’ve continued to work together since the award of that fellowship and we’re now doing diffusion tensor imaging, which is what Eleftheria was doing before for the heart, but for dementia mouse models.

James Datchler:

Stephen, I met after a conference actually, a couple of years ago in Durham, and we got talking. I don’t know, maybe you can recount this better than I, but you expressed an interest in coming to work in Durham. So we’ve worked on that aspect. However, I also needed to do some electrophysiology, so through you and Miles, your boss, we’ve started to study my dementia mouse model in a way that I couldn’t in Durham, with in vitro electrophysiology. So that’s where Stephen’s contributing to my project.

James Datchler:

Moving forwards, I guess having the mice and having the funding in place, I’ve been able to try and develop a couple of new projects with both Stephen and Eleftheria, one that looks more towards epilepsy in Alzheimer’s disease and one that looks at heart function and how it goes wrong, how that contributes to dementia.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay, great. So, James, oh God, Stephen, you have a background in epilepsy.

Stephen Hall:

That’s right. Yeah.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

But you have an interest in dementia. Is that right?

Stephen Hall:

That’s spot on. Yeah. So, this will take you back a little bit, my initial interest really or my initial funding for the postdoc I’m working on at the moment is to do with sleep and learning and memory and cognition during sleep. But one of the main aspects of that is we’re really interested in sleep associated epilepsies, particularly absence epilepsies.

Stephen Hall:

And so that’s what I’ve been working on for the last five or six years now, trying to understand absence epilepsies or absence like epilepsies. But I’ve got strong personal connections to Alzheimer’s disease, and so would like to transition across into Alzheimer’s disease.

Stephen Hall:

And so having a look at where I could fit into the current landscape of research in Alzheimer’s and dementia, there’s a huge link between the prevalence of seizures and dementias. So that’s currently estimated at around 42% of Alzheimer’s patients suffer seizures as well. So it seems like there’s a really strong link there. And hopefully having such a good background in epilepsy, hopefully I might be the person to have a look and see what’s really going on in these sort of seizure activity.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Yeah. So you decided to change field. And is that how you got talking to James at the conference?

Stephen Hall:

That’s exactly right. Yeah. So I’ve also got a few ideas around sleep and Alzheimer’s disease as well. And that’s initially why I came and spoke to James and his colleague, Dr. Colin Lever in Durham, about potentially coming up and working with them. I think that initial contact was probably made over two years ago now.

Stephen Hall:

But for the last maybe six to eight months, we’ve been formulating more solid and concrete ideas as to how we’re going to take our research forward.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And are you applying for funding?

Stephen Hall:

I am. Yes, we’ve got a fellowship application that will be going towards the end of this month. So fingers crossed.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Yeah, good luck.

Stephen Hall:

Thank you.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay, moving on a bit to the social effects that are important in dementia, do you have any comments on that?

James Datchler:

Yeah. So like I say, I was working in autism and I was really interested in how the brain processes social function. I was working in that in a sort of normal sense. How does the brain normally remember people and recall people and how does neurons process social information? I was working in autism, genetic mouse models, however, an opportunity came up to start to look at this, in terms of Alzheimer’s disease.

James Datchler:

And when I started formulating these ideas, there really wasn’t a huge amount surrounding dementia and social withdrawal. But it was noted, there was a few studies that basically showed that the broader your social networks, that’s the more people you regularly communicate with, go out with, et cetera, that can actually protect you from cognitive loss, despite your pathology getting worse. I was really interested in that.

James Datchler:

So what is this about social, that’s important, that actually is somewhat protective? Now, since I started the fellowship, more stuff like that’s come out. So the Lancet Commission that showed that social isolation is a risk factor for dementia. There’s more and more coming out that suggests that social factors are an important part of dementia, could even cause dementia. That’s a very small proportion compared to other risk factors, but it is now a bonafide risk factor.

James Datchler:

So that’s where I was able to transition what I was doing and really very few people are trying to understand the mechanisms. There’s a lot on social psychology sides, on showing that social isolation, et cetera, is a risk. But very few trying to understand where in the brain that was being manifested, the neural mechanisms, et cetera.

James Datchler:

So this is where we’ve been using mouse models to try and explore this a little bit more. And so partly the work I do with Eleftheria is taking a whole brain approach to see which brain regions, particularly within the social brain, so those regions that process social information, which ones may show more pathology or degrade earlier than others. And with Steve, looking at how neurons function, so looking at different parts of the social brain, which we’ve now done, and seeing if there’s differences.

James Datchler:

So one brain region is affected versus one that’s not affected, to give us some insights of, maybe this brain region is more important early on in social withdrawal than another. And it gives us ways of targeting, maybe therapeutically, but by a variety of means we can actually try and improve social function if we understand it better.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

So how do you model social withdrawal in your mouse models?

James Datchler:

So, as this is a very early study, because not a lot has been done on this, we’re really just looking at normal social functions. So we take experiments where mice explore novel mice and see how well they explore them, how motivated they are to explore these mice, and how well they can remember mice that they’ve already explored.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

That’s just a behavior, just an observation.

James Datchler:

Yeah, so the behavior is observation at the moment. And then from there, we take the brains of these mice and further explore, we already know a bit about the social brain, what brain regions are important. That’s where we can target our further studies with the electrophysiology, with the MRI, with genetics, et cetera, to try and understand at a synaptic receptor, synaptic protein basis, what’s going on.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay, and so the MRI, that’s where you come in.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Yes. So, over the years in the University of Leeds, I had the opportunity to be involved with a lot of the MRI and develop a lot of protocols and different techniques and analysis software, if you wish.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

So when James’s project came alive, if you wish, we started looking at the whole brains, where we scanned them in the MRI, take the 3D images, and try through bioinformatics software and computers to try and connect different regions of the brain to each other. So that goes back to a lot of the behavioral studies, where specific behaviors come from, memories are stored. So you know if some of the connections are lost in the mice that they’re affected by dementia, we can see them in the MRI, because we can’t map those connections that are actually missing, or they’re altered in other ways.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Do you do that live or is that-

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

We do that ex vivo. So we extract the brain from the mouse. That gives us the opportunities to run a lot longer and more detailed protocols. Because it’s the primary step of the project. Of course, when it comes to applying that in the clinic, those protocols can be altered and be as detailed, but will last for a lot shorter times and will be applied to humans.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

But by that point, you’ll know regions to look at.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Yes, but the point is to do it as detailed and as lengthy as possible to understand the connections and map them and when you do know what you’re looking at and you know what’s missing or has been changed in which one has been changed, then you can change your protocol to be applicable in the clinic.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Have you done MRI in humans as well?

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

I have been involved in studies, but not for this project. In the University of Leeds, I have a lot of connections with clinicians in Leeds General Infirmary. And I’ve been involved in a lot of studies that use MRI to study cardiac function in humans. And that’s how I’ve been involved in different types of protocols and analysis. I know how you can explore the possibilities of transferring one protocol, experimental protocol into a clinical protocol.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay. And Steve, do you use these brains to do the electrophysiology on? Is that how it’s all linking together to look at the function?

Stephen Hall:

No, so we need them a bit fresher than I can get away with. So James sent us a cohort down to York University. And like I say, my boss, Miles Whittington has got an excellent in vitro laboratory down there, and we’ve managed to remove those brains and then we slice them up, so we can take little regions that are of interest.

Stephen Hall:

So for the study that we’re doing at the moment, obviously, we’re looking at social regions and things like prefrontal cortex and basolateral amygdala. And we decided to take a bit more of a complex look at what was going on in there. So there are lots of things you can do within electrophysiology, whether it’s something like long-term potentiation or LTD protocols.

Stephen Hall:

What we decided to do was to look at rhythms, so oscillatory activity in these brain regions. And rhythms are critically important, because they’re really a function of how the brain can communicate from one region to the other. What we’ve done for many years, so all the way back to my PhD, was to generate rhythms in these sort of brain regions.

Stephen Hall:

And so what we did is we took these Alzheimer’s mice, and basically generated some gamma rhythms or some higher order rhythms and looked at how they changed from wild type and Alzheimer’s model mice.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Will you eventually have mice that have had the social withdrawal, so you’ll get the mice that have had behavior studies done to them, given to…

Stephen Hall:

So not really, but obviously these are time matched. So the experiments that James will be doing on the social withdrawal we’ve got exactly the same time points, exactly the same level of variability, AB deposition and plaque level, et cetera. So although not the same mice, we’re making a direct comparison there between the rhythms that are in these mice at certain ages and the social withdrawal and social behavioral effects that James is seeing.

James Datchler:

Ultimately, not everything can be a within subject study, because within the program, we need to prepare brains by fixing them for the MRI. So that precludes doing a lot of other experiments. So some mice have to go off for MRI, some go for electrophysiology, some need to be frozen for-

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Genetics.

James Datchler:

Genetics. So there’s only so many things that we can do that’s within subject.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

So although we will use different techniques that require different preparation, we all use the same ages, because from the same cohort of mice, you can separate them, but age them at the same time point and we’ll say these will go to Steve, these will go to James, these will come to me. So we’re all at the same time point as humanly possible, plus or minus a couple of days, we’d all be at the same time point. And we will do all of our experiments and then combine them for the findings.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Yeah. So how are you finding or working in different departments and different universities? Is that going? well?

James Datchler:

I think that’s just the way of science nowadays.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

You have to have collaborations of different people that can do different things in different universities, because different people have different connections and access to equipment. If it was all down to James, he wouldn’t have been able to do, he wouldn’t have had the appropriate access to the MRI. Then he takes someone who has done the MRI to show him how to do the MRI and analyze it, then he wouldn’t have had the electrophys rig that Stephen has-

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And the expertise.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Stephen has some amazing… Yeah. And also it’s the cost. If you expect from one person to own everything and have access to everything, you wouldn’t be able to do it just in one funding round.

James Datchler:

If you work with people that you trust and they do what they say they’re going to do, it’s not really a problem. There are many advantages of, if you want to do more complicated science, you can’t do that alone. And by working with others, might get a benefit, because I can do better science within my project. But having the mice allows me to some degree payback, by allowing the tissues to go to other studies that perhaps facilitate future grants that are not necessarily within my expertise.

James Datchler:

So while you’ve been helping me out, you’ve done your pilot data for your grants, and then Eleftheria and I have a study going on that looks at cardiac function in these mice. And that’s probably some of the most exciting work that I’m involved with at the moment actually. The least exciting work that I’m doing is my fellowship. I’m really, really excited by the two projects that these mice have facilitated, that’s nothing to do with my expertise at all. But it’s quite nice to-

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

But the cardiac structure project, which was a sideline has actually produced some very exciting results this week, last week and this week. And it’s all based, because it’s so in its baby steps, it’s still MRI, but it’s going to involve some pilot data from genetics, and it has produced some quite exciting results.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

And as James said, it has given me the opportunity to continue to work together in the new grant that is going to be written for me. And just James working by himself, it just limits… It also limits the ideas, one person can only have so many ideas and if you manage to have all the ideas and you have no one to help you with, then you can’t move forward.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Well, you can have an idea and then talk to someone who’s an expert in that field and they can see how they can use those techniques for you to realize your idea. So do you think gone are the days of single author papers and we’re moving towards a more collaborative-

James Datchler:

I think they have gone.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Decades.

James Datchler:

They were gone before I started. I remember doing a journal club and it was the last single author paper I’ve actually seen. That as back in 2007. I think they’re gone, but also the demands of funders have changed. I don’t think you can be alone. It’s almost a given that you’re working with others. There’s no grant or fellowship that I know that doesn’t ask who your mentor or collaborator is, or who else you’re working with. It’s just not the way it goes.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Everyone asks, who is your international partner, who is your industrial partner, who is your local partner? You will not be funded if you are… and to be fair, we all have specialized knowledge to move forward. We don’t know everything to do it by ourselves.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

So although we have a broader knowledge of science, and we understand all of it, and we know where we’re moving with all of the different experiments, we can’t all of us do all of the experiments by ourselves.

James Datchler:

I think what’s really changed is journals. What it requires to get even into an average journal now is quite unbelievable. I think all three of us have hit our heads on desks, where the bar is now so high, you have to work with other people. There are super labs that can do everything in one lab, but unless you’re in there, you need help.

James Datchler:

And if you’re trying to break out as an ECR and trying to get established, it’s a lot tougher. It’s easier for a very established professor to work with lots of people and have tens of millions in funding, and have all that on offer. But if you’re more junior and trying to establish yourself, you need the support of others.

James Datchler:

I don’t know, in this case, I quite like this, actually, because it doesn’t have to be really senior people that support you. You can get support from other ECRs and with some nice bosses, you can actually really facilitate your career and help others along the way.

Stephen Hall:

I personally think it’s fun. I think it’s really good fun to work as a team. I know more about DTMRI than I did six months ago.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

I question that, we’ll have some questions on the way back.

Stephen Hall:

We’ll have a quiz. I prefer to view it as a positive thing, rather than a negative thing. And a lot of the stuff that we do not only requires the input of collaborators, it needs that input. It’s fun to bounce ideas off other people. It’s fun to see these potential proposals and then hopefully see them through, so I like it. I like working with others.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Good. And you said earlier that you two met, James and Steve you met at a conference, and you guys used to do your PhD together?

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

We did our PhDs in the same lab back in the day,

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

So what tips would you have for ECLs on networking and forming these collaborations?

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Go to conferences and approach people. Don’t just sit in the back of a lecture theater frantically taking notes. That’s never going to help you. But when you go to a conference, you need to approach the people that you think that can help you, introduce yourself with confidence, have good questions. So think about your question before you pose it.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

And, well, from my experience, constantly talk to people. Don’t let them forget you. And if you can, make yourself known for one thing. From experience, make yourself known for one thing and once you’re known and when people put your name in Google and you come up, you know you’re in the right track.

James Datchler:

That last point is really, it said a lot, but it is important to be known for one thing. I’m not, and I’ve been lucky, but I’m also very aware of my luck in that sense. I’m not really known. And perhaps what I am known for is my PhD work, not what I’ve done after.

James Datchler:

So try and be established, or try and be known for one thing. My advice echoes Eleftheria’s, talk to people. I’ve constantly been surprised how helpful people can be, not everyone. But you have to have the confidence. If you’ve got an idea and you’re passionate about something and it’s got to be a half decent idea. But if it is, and you speak to people, you’ll be surprised how supportive people can be.

James Datchler:

I started working with my mentor in Durham, Colin Lever, that Steve mentioned. And it just came about from speaking to someone else when I was at Leeds, and he said, this was about in vivo electrophysiology. He said, I know the guy, I’ll set up a meeting for you and you can speak to Colin. I had a chat with him, told him my idea. And he basically went, great. This is what I want to do as well, let’s make it happen.

James Datchler:

So we got a couple of grants to facilitate it. But that was back in 2012, I think. And we just continued building that relationship year after year, slow steps, but it eventually led to something. So talked to people, I’ve had a lot of good fortune in conferences. Like I say you’ve got to have the confidence to meet people, don’t just go and look at posters and sit in lectures, talk to people, go to the parties, go to the pubs.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Definitely. Every conference has like parties or what do they call them?

James Datchler:

Social. Stuff like that.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

So go to the social, grab yourself an alcoholic drink, and just mingle, gain the circle and start talking. Oh, you’re the guy with this paper. Yeah, and I had this idea and I met that guy.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

The best advice I got from our PhD supervisor is, don’t be afraid to choose a side and make friends. Because in science, you have to make friends. And once you have friends, you have enemies. But that means you move forward. You can’t be loved by everybody. People will hate you. People will stop your career, people will trash your grants and your papers. But there are people who will help you and will agree with your ideas.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

So you just have to choose sides and follow your gut instinct, but have good ideas and don’t be afraid to express yourself in the people that matter.

James Datchler:

Yeah, this is where we met, wasn’t it? At a social after.

Stephen Hall:

I think one more thing. I completely echo what you’ve said. But one more thing I would think I’d probably add to any early career scientists out there is it does take practice. I really was not very good at networking when I first started. And I think it does take a bit of practice to not get put off by the person that you pick to talk to, who’s just too busy at that moment or has just had a grant that’s come back not positive and they’re just not really in the mood at that time.

Stephen Hall:

Don’t let those setbacks hurt you and keep doing the talking, even if it’s not your forte, you will get there.

James Datchler:

The other thing, resilience is a key aspect of it, if you want to try and progress. The other thing that is key is think about things early. Because maybe in what we’ve talked about, things have come off, you get the impression that it’s years of prep. We first talked two years ago and we’re just getting a grant in now. We’ve been working for years. It is a very, very long process.

James Datchler:

You can’t expect to meet someone who will have this idea that I’m going to have a chat to someone, and then one month later, put something in. If you’re trying to formulate something, at least for fellowships and grants, obviously, it’s very different if you want to go off and work in industry, we can’t speak to that really, we have no expertise.

James Datchler:

But in terms of grants it’s generally a long process. So I’ve always said the earlier you can think about what you want your career to be, start putting small things in place. Even if it’s like a paper here, talking to the person there, maybe small grants. It is a long slog to actually get something together and that’s perhaps not said as much as it should be.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

It takes years of prep. And like Stephen said, you will talk to the first person and they’ll be grumpy, because their paper and their grant was rejected in the same week. He or she doesn’t have anything against you. But science will put you down a million times and reward you once. So everybody will be grumpy every day of the year, you just have to persevere and it takes years.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Me and James often have a very good idea over dinner, and it’ll take months to get the data from the one idea we’ve had. And then you have to find the right funder, which means maybe you’re emailing their office to punt the idea, oh, we’ve had this and it showed that. And that will take weeks to come back and then writing a grant or a fellowship takes months, because there’s subtle lengthy process and pages upon pages upon pages of written things.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

So start early, so you can get somewhere in the years to come, while you’re preparing yourself.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay, you touched briefly on resilience. Can I ask you how many grants and papers you’ve had rejected? Because I think that’s quite obviously-

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

I’m not going to embarrass myself by saying the number.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

But I think sometimes it’s important to talk about, you get rejected, but you will also get accepted.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

As an example, in one year I was rejected by all the charities and the major research councils. But then I won the award for the best researcher of the year.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Congratulations.

James Datchler:

By Lush, the Lush Prize.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

The Lush Prize for working without animal models, working with humans. So you see, my confidence was completely destroyed by being rejected by everybody. But then an award came my way and things have changed things. So be resilient, because you’re not the only person that has a good idea. And once your project is written and it’s in front of a panel it’s just those 11, 12, 15 people, how many in one room judging so many applications and you’re just on. It doesn’t mean that you’re the best person in the room, but you have to believe that you’re the best person and keep trying. And one of them will have faith.

James Datchler:

Papers? I can’t even count on count.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

I can’t count how many times-

James Datchler:

It’s almost not worth counting. I don’t even think about it. It’s just part of the course.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

I think that’s what we have to talk about, make it a bit more normal.

James Datchler:

If I’m submitting a paper, it’s almost my first thought is, where am I sending it next? It’s barely even a thought of, well, this will get accepted in Nature.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

But it will start from Nature.

James Datchler:

It will start from Nature. Yeah, it’s tough. We’ve had an absolute nightmare with a paper at the moment, it’s on the old autism work. And it’s bounced… How many? Six now?

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

I think we’re on the sixth. But people also have to understand that there’s a lot of politics, because papers are reviewed by fellow scientists, not the journal.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

That’s a topic for a whole other podcast.

James Datchler:

Yeah. It is what it is. And you take it personally for the day. With the last one, I’ve really taken it personally, because it was a personal attack.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

For the week.

James Datchler:

I’ve actually appealed this one, which is unusual. But that is what it is.

James Datchler:

Grants, I guess I’ve been luckier than others with funding, I think it’s fair to say. But I’ve still got the drawer of stuff that didn’t work. I don’t know, I think I wrote five to get the Alzheimer’s Society one, so four or five rejected and one funded.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

And that was with the same idea or tweaked a bit?

James Datchler:

Tweaked, let’s say, tweaked.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Because I guess that was your point, you can go to a panel of people with an idea and they reject it. They’re not necessarily rejecting the idea or you. It’s just it wasn’t right at that time. So you have to pick yourself up and go, well, I’ll try again.

James Datchler:

It could be many things. That’s certainly one. You can be lucky, and someone on the panel has a broad enough understanding or is in your research domain to go, I get this, and want to see it funded. You can be unlucky and they’re just… so we’re all animal model people and we come up against a cell biologist that only grows cells. We don’t tend to fare very well.

James Datchler:

And that’s not uniform. That’s just an example of where you come a bit unstuck. And if you go for a fellowship, you have a bad interview on the day, they’re only 30 minutes long.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Or your presentation is actually stopwatch, that has started before you entered the door.

James Datchler:

Five minutes. You stumble a little bit or anything could happen.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Anything can happen.

James Datchler:

But it is part of the course, success isn’t a guarantee. But I think of it like anything, if you’re in business, you wouldn’t get every deal that you went for. You wouldn’t win every case if you’re a lawyer. It’s just the way it is. Success is not guaranteed.

James Datchler:

And the ones that I think, in my very, very limited experience so far, the ones that tend to progress are more the resilient ones. The ones that just brush off and have another crack at it. And that assumes that you’ve got a good enough CV anyway. There are some barriers to it. Number of papers, funding success, esteem, et cetera. So there are some barriers, but if you’re there or thereabouts and you’re resilient enough, you should break through eventually.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

And this is where connections that we spoke about before count, because if you’ve met the right prof who made it on the panel, this prof if you made a good impression, will remember your name. And if you’re also known for something, will remember your name even better.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Associated with that.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

You have to have a good CV. Not everybody can write a fellowship, because if you don’t have any papers, if you’ve never had the experience, you won’t move ahead of the people that have had the papers and the experience. But if you do make it to the last point before the panel and people on the panel have met you, and you’ve made a good impression, because you’ve had a good talk in a conference, you’ve mingled in the crowd, you went to the social, you’ve introduced yourself, then they might look at you favorably.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Because they know you, you’re not just a piece of paper in front of them.

James Datchler:

I was told by someone that they’re looking for a safe pair of hands. And they’re giving you a lot of money at the end of the day, and they’re looking for a safe pair of hands, someone that if something goes wrong, can think of new things, can actually produce the goods. This is why paper is so important. You need someone that can actually be given money and deliver.

James Datchler:

So if you’ve got that behind you, it’s not impossible. If you’re known for being that, then it does help the funding decision.

Stephen Hall:

I think the one thing that I’d like to add if that’s all right-

James Datchler:

No.

Stephen Hall:

The reason being is that James is sat next to me, and he’s really, really good at this. And it’s something that I wasn’t aware of till I started applying for grants, is that actually, a lot of the funding bodies welcome a bit of dialogue. A bit of a chat with them about what you’re going to put in. Maybe they’ll give you a bit of feedback about your work, et cetera.

Stephen Hall:

And it’s also easy to get that rejection and go, I’m never going to that funding body. I hate them. It’s so horrible. But actually, if you just take it a bit more constructively, and the fact that perhaps what you put in wasn’t perfect, try and make it a bit better, have a dialogue with them, discuss as to how you can make things better. And then try again.

Stephen Hall:

I think it’s a really important thing to think about, that particularly where we’re going with this fellowship, they really welcome dialogue and that’s lovely. That’s really nice to have that feedback and feed forward about what’s going on and how you can improve things.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Well, they want their money to be put to good use I guess, don’t they?

Stephen Hall:

Exactly.

Eleftheria Pervolaraki:

Yes, they want good value for their money. But not only they can check your idea, they can also check your CV. So if you do have, the bigger question of, do I even have the CV to apply for a fellowship? You can ask them, you can make contact, and they will, a lot of the charities and the research councils, they will make the time to have a look and say, actually, you wouldn’t be competitive for this, but we’d like to suggest this.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

I guess that links back to thinking early on about your career about what you can do to-

James Datchler:

Certainly in terms of dementia, Steve’s points, dementia research, Steve’s point is a good one, because there’s far more involvement at least for Alzheimer’s Society with the lay research network that they have. You can get feedback not just on the science, but also on the lay side. So people affected by dementia, people have had family members and you can get a pretty good feel. Is this idea a good one or not? Would you as lay members like to see this funded or not? Or what can we do to improve?

James Datchler:

So it’s not just the science, there’s all aspects and that links in a little bit more to impact.

Megan Calvert-O’Hare:

Okay, great. This has been really interesting. So I’d like to say thank you to all for coming. And we hope you enjoyed this podcast. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast through SoundCloud or iTunes. Tell your friends and colleagues and share via social media. Make sure you check out our website dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, where there’s more practical advice and tips for early career researchers. Thank you.

Voice Over:

This was a podcast brought to you by Dementia Researcher. Everything you need in one place. Register today at dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk.

END