Salon – How to win friends and influence people

A weekly webinar to discuss careers and research topics. These sessions combine livestreams, guest speakers, and group online chat to exchange ideas, challenge, influence, inspire, and educate. In this session, we hear from Rebecca Williams & Emre Yavuz who are back in the Salon to talks about ‘How to win friends and influence people‘.

In research and academia, your work may speak volumes, but your ability to build relationships and influence others can amplify its impact. Success isn’t just about publishing papers or securing grants; it’s about cultivating collaborations, earning trust, and inspiring others to see the value in your ideas – it also helps to have people around you when you’re having a bad day, month or even year! How do you network effectively, communicate with confidence, and foster connections that drive your career forward? Today, we’ll discuss the skills and strategies that turn colleagues into allies, mentors into advocates, and ideas into opportunities—empowering you to thrive in the competitive world of academia.

Speakers

Adam Smith is the Programme Director for ‘Dementia Researcher’ a worldwide early career dementia researcher support service run by University College London and funded by the NIHR, Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society and Race Against Dementia. Adam has a background in healthcare service improvement, having previously worked within the NHS and at the Department of Health and Social Care on topics as varied as reducing waiting times, patient choice and healthcare associated infections. For the past 13 years he has exclusively worked on improving the lives of people living with dementia, undertaking research, and leading initiatives such as Join Dementia Research and Enabling Research in Care Homes. Now his time is focussed on trying to attract more people to the research field, and improving collaborations and support to ensure researchers are retained on this important topic.

Emre Yavuz – is a PhD Student at University College London in the Spiers Lab. His PhD is focussed on integrating science and technology to understand how our brain constructs representations of the world and uses them to remember, navigate and imagine space across the lifespan. He is also exploring the neurobiological mechanisms underlying such processes, using various techniques including brain imaging (including fNIRS and fMRI), neuropsychological testing, eye-tracking and virtuality reality. This is with the aim of developing navigation-based tests to help diagnose those with neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

Programme

The format of the event is a 30 minute livestream where the speakers will each present their thoughts on this topic for 10 minutes each, the host will then ask questions and the livestream will end. The speakers will then join the online chat and interact with the audience, answering questions and giving those who attended a chance to share their thoughts on the topic.