Podcast – ARUK Conference Roundup 2023, Part One

Voice Over:

Welcome to the Dementia Researcher podcast, brought to you by the University College London, and the NIHR, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society, Race Against Dementia, and the Alzheimer’s Association, supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Hello, and thank you for tuning into the Dementia Researcher podcast. I’m Dr. Fiona McLean and I’m delighted to be hosting this special episode recorded on location from the Alzheimer’s Research UK Conference in amazing Aberdeen. We’re sitting with our coats on, not because it’s cold outside, because Adam switched off the heating in this room.

This is a first show in a two-part special bringing you all the news and highlights from one of my favorite events in the calendar. Today, we’re focusing on the Early Career Researcher Day, which is a fantastic combination of career talks and ECR flash presentations. Joining me to share their best bits and takeaways, I have the brilliant Dr. Claire Durrant, the amazing Dr. Ian Harrison, and the incredible Dr. Soraya Meftah. Hello everyone.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Hi.

Dr Ian Harrison:

Hi there.

Dr Soraya Meftah:

Hello.

Dr Fiona McLean:

So, what we’re going to do is go around the table and do some proper introductions. We will kick off with Claire.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Hi, I’m Dr. Claire Durrant, and I’m a Race against Dementia Dyson Fellow working at the University of Edinburgh.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Fantastic. Soraya?

Dr Soraya Meftah:

Hello, I’m Soraya Meftah, and I’m a Post-doctoral Research Fellow, also at the University of Edinburgh.

Dr Fiona McLean:

And Ian.

Dr Ian Harrison:

Hi, so my name’s Ian Harrison. I’m an Alzheimer’s Research UK and Parkinson’s UK Senior Research Fellow at UCL.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Thanks, everyone. Before we get into your highlights, I just want to ask, is anyone presenting this week?

Dr Claire Durrant:

Yes, I have a 10-minute presentation in the Scottish Research Highlights on the Wednesday, so very excited to be showcasing some of the work we’re doing in Edinburgh.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Fantastic. I will also be joining you in that session, Claire, as well, and I will be talking about some of my work with type two diabetes and the links with Alzheimer’s and what we think is happening in the blood brain barrier. So, let’s get to the highlights. Claire, would you like to go first?

Dr Claire Durrant:

Yeah, so I’m perhaps a little biased because I chaired one of the sessions today, but it was a session all about building independence. So, three fantastic early to mid-career PIs all talking about the challenges, pitfalls and highs of starting your own lab and how to manage that.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Who was in that session?

Dr Claire Durrant:

So it was Dr. Petra Proitsi, from Kings College London, I think, Dr. Greg Finley from Dundee, and Daniel Erskine from Newcastle.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Amazing, and what was the main takeaways from that panel that you chaired?

Dr Claire Durrant:

I think a lot of it was that no one has the same path, and finding your own way in science, be that through finding the right mentors, finding the right question, but then also when you get that initial funding really to try and capitalize on it. So, making sure you’re negotiating for things like extra space, getting more grant funding, and getting the right people into your lab, and also planning your life around it. Have kids, and that you can do things like have kids and look after family members, and be a PI, and be successful. So it was really fantastic to have some very open and honest conversations about balancing different challenges with the science, but also the home life balance as well.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Absolutely. I was in that session, and I completely agree with you. It was great to hear about people who have had challenges but have gone on and been extremely successful and have also managed to have that work-life balance, which is essential to any researcher to be a healthy person and the best person they can be, and therefore the best scientist they can be. So, I thought it was an excellent panel and you chaired it so well.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Oh, thank you. I think we try to see it as a bit of a rallying cry, if you like, to put a bit of change into the field as well because a lot of us have come up against some barriers in our career, but we sense that it’s getting better, and if we can keep pushing things in the right way and make it better for the people coming up after us, and for ourselves as we continue to work through this field, I think that would be fantastic. So, a huge thing came up was the role in men in parental leave as well, that it’s not just going to be a female problem, the idea of having children in science and how we can support people with children working in the lab, and just making it a bit more common and chatting about it so that it’s not some deep dark secret, that funnily enough people have lives outside of science, that’s actually a part of what makes us good at the jobs that we do.

Dr Fiona McLean:

And I think having these panels normalizes these conversations for the next generation of researchers coming through, because we’re sitting here as post-doc level and fellows, but we have a lot of PhD students here, so I think it’s really great for them to hear those conversations early on in their academic careers as well. Soraya, what was your favorite panel or highlight from today?

Dr Soraya Meftah:

So, I always really like the ECR days because I think PhD students are the best presenters of the work. I always enjoy watching them present more than senior PIs that maybe are a little bit less in love with the science. Whereas, whenever I watch PhD students presenting their work, they’re so excited and so invested, and we’ve had a very good selection of just 15, or 10, 15 minute talks, and then we also had quite a nice array of flash talks as well. I think flash talks are also very difficult to get in a lot of information in two, three minutes, and all of them did such a fabulous job. I was trying to read my notes to figure out if I could pick out one or two names that were really highlighted for me, but I think all of them were just so amazing, so, go PhDs.

Dr Fiona McLean:

I also thought from watching the PhD talks that the slides are so clear, the illustrations the PhD students are using are just so sharp, and sometimes you get a professor when they give a talk, it’ll have about 50 different graphs on it.

Dr Ian Harrison:

And none of them match, they’re all [inaudible 00:05:54].

Dr Fiona McLean:

They’re all snipped out papers, and they rush through them. But these PhD students, they were so clear and concise, and it really is a credit to them how good that was. That’s such an important skill for being able to communicate your research, so I agree, it was excellent.

Dr Claire Durrant:

I thought one thing that was really nice that they started to do this year was have a lay slide at the end, and that was something that all the PhD students I thought did really well. To really convey it in a way that, if you had to take this away and just portray it to any member of the public on the street, that’s what you would say. And I think that was a really nice thing they’ve added for this particular conference.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Yeah, I think so as well. And I think with the lay slide, it’s also very good for scientists, because sometimes someone can present quite a lot of research and just having that last slide where it’s all summarized, you go, oh yeah.

Dr Claire Durrant:

I see the whole picture

Dr Ian Harrison:

Really kind of distills it down to the main points.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Absolutely. So Ian, what was your favorite thing or highlight from today?

Dr Ian Harrison:

So, at the same time as Claire was in her session, which I would’ve wanted to go to actually, but I was a panel member on the panel discussion about mentoring. So, we were discussing a pilot project that was rolled out a couple years ago now. It was a mentoring pairing scheme between Scotland and UCL. So I was on there as the mentor, in my mentor-mentee pair, with Josie Fullerton. We were talking about the kind of impact that this network scheme has had, and Nathan presented some of the data showing how this has positively affected the careers and progressions of the people that have been involved, and what our interests were, if we’d got what we wanted out of the scheme and that sort of thing. Me and Josie gave a bit of background about how we were paired, how we mentor, so how often we meet, just to give ECR’s an idea of what mentoring could be if you get involved in one of these schemes.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Sounds fantastic, so just a little bit more on the mentoring. So it’s an Alzheimer’s Research UK scheme now, because after the pilot between UCL and Scotland Networks, it was deemed so successful that ARUK decided to roll it out. So if you want any more information you’ll be able to find that on their website. But, back to your peer, so you and Josie were set up during the pilot scheme?

Dr Ian Harrison:

Mm-hmm.

Dr Fiona McLean:

And have continued to?

Dr Ian Harrison:

Yeah.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Mentoring?

Dr Ian Harrison:

We highlighted, actually, in our slides that we presented today, when we were initially paired, it said there was a sentence in the kind of blurb that we got sent that the initial pilot was supposed to be for six months, but we’re two years, and we still meet each month.

We were initially paired as part of the pilot scheme, and we’ve just kind of continued to meet. I mean, things have changed a bit since we started meeting, and the roles of the things that we focus on, and the things that we discuss on a month-to-month basis have changed and evolved over time, but I think we’re both keen to keep that going as long as we can.

Dr Fiona McLean:

That’s fantastic, and hopefully from doing the session at the conference, more of the ECRs will be aware of the scheme and then hopefully more people will sign up as well next year because everyone I speak to said that it’s been such a fantastic scheme and it’s really worked well. So that sounds like it’d be a really great panel. I also wasn’t at that one, but well, it’s good to catch up with you. You know all about it. So back to you, Claire, was there anything else apart from chairing the panel, what else have you really enjoyed from this day?

Dr Claire Durrant:

Well, there was a fantastic PhD talk. So for me, I’m all about organic brain slices, and Emily Groves, from Kings College of London, I thought did a really good tour de force, really interesting data about [inaudible 00:09:54] Three, and tau pathology and slices. She just did a fantastic job of presenting it in a really engaging way, so no doubt some of my team will be running through the conference center trying to find her to have a chat.

It’s things like that, just getting a flavor for what people are working on, it just really inspires you and to make connections and things, and yeah, just like Soraya, was really overwhelmed by how fantastic people are at presenting their work. And the ECR day gives that kind of environment, that you can see people feel a bit more relaxed, and the level of questions that we were getting after these talks. Each talk probably had 20 really good questions, people could vote up and down, so we’re getting really relevant questions asked and answered as well. The engagement with the science is just always so impressive.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Absolutely. I completely agree. I thought that talk was a standout for myself as well, and I thought the one thing that she spoke about was actually how she had moved to the slices from originally planning to have done this in vivo, in mouse models, and how COVID had actually disrupted that, and she’d moved to the slices instead. So I thought, now hearing as we move away from that initial COVID interruption in our working and research lives, it’s really great to see how she’s managed that, adapted it, and has still got this fantastic data using a technique that she hadn’t originally planned on doing. And obviously, is a technique that lots of people can use, and like you said, your team will be running after her to find out how she’s getting on with it. So that’s really, really great. Soraya, apart from the PhD talks, was there anything that you really enjoyed hearing about today?

Dr Soraya Meftah:

So, I actually don’t know how this slipped my mind as not being my first thing, and so what I really like about Alzheimer’s Research UK is they always tend to start the conference off with framing it back into the actual disease. So, today we had Kath Baxter talking to us at the start of the day about her experience with her mom and how she had frontotemporal dementia, and how that had affected her life, her dad’s life, and then how she’d channeled that into fundraising. So actually I’ve kind of written down a few notes from that. She’s raised over 80,000 pounds, which I think is a ridiculous amount of money. And actually, I didn’t realize that AIUK itself, 73 P from each pound goes to research, which I think is a really high amount compared to other charities. So that was something I’d pulled separately apart from the fact that I think we can always get quite bogged down in our research and the day-to-day kind of things in the lab and you just forget about the actual disease that you’re studying or the diseases let’s say that we’re studying.

So it was really nice to have Kath bring it back to being like, this is the patient, this is why we, everyone appreciates the work that you do and how great it is, and so I always find it quite a motivating, powerful moment in the conferences whenever they have the volunteers come in, or people with lived experiences, that they then share it with us and it’s a really nice moment for me always.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Absolutely. Kath actually spoke up at one of our Scotland Network ECR days before the pandemic, so probably about five years ago now. And it’s absolutely incredible, I mean, it was incredible then what she was doing with her fundraising and her story about her mom. But it’s really incredible now to see her back, still fundraising, and still spreading that message about why we need to do dementia research, and her work and, yeah, she’s just a fantastic person to hear speak.

And these lived experiences, they always really get me, I’m sitting there sort of welling up, and it does put into perspective your research. Sometimes you can get really stressed out, and you get a bit fed up with the lab if things aren’t going as you want them to, but then you hear these people speaking, it’s like a reset for me, personally. It’s like a reset to be like, okay, maybe there’s some struggles but actually what the bigger picture here is we’re really trying to solve this disease, and these are the people that are behind us when we feel alone in the lab. These are the people who are sitting at home absolutely rooting for us. So, oh, you can hear it in my voice. I’m getting a bit emotional again.

Dr Ian Harrison:

It’s why we’re here, right? It’s nice to have that at the beginning of the confidence, it brings everyone onto the same level, and it’s like, right, we are here to talk about the science that we’ve been doing. We are together in this problem.

Dr Fiona McLean:

It sets the tone, I think.

Dr Ian Harrison:

Yeah.

Dr Fiona McLean:

It sets from the very [inaudible 00:14:25]. Big thanks to Kath for sharing her story because it’s not easy for her either to stand up in front of so many people and talk about that. So, thank you, Kath. Ian, what was another takeaway from today that you enjoyed?

Dr Ian Harrison:

Yeah, so I was going to highlight a talk from a PhD student I saw that I really liked. It was by Alex Miller from Plymouth, and he presented this work with this really cool prep that I hadn’t come across before, called Compound Action Potential Recordings, he was looking at white matter and white matter’s generation. So, they were exposing an optic nerve, and then by bathing it in CSF and then recording directly from it, to get EFIS recordings. He was doing some really cool work where they were looking at the effects of LPS on that, with or without a reduced oxygen in the CSF. It was just a really interesting preparation that I’d never really come across before where it’s ex vivo, but it’s still has real in vivo applications.

It was nice then he followed it on with some kind of nice myelin imaging that kind of went the same way, that the hypoxia had a response in terms of the response that they were seeing in both myelin imaging and also the cap recordings, which wasn’t there with LPS, but LPS exacerbated the effects of hypoxia in this setting.

It was one of those presentations where you can tell that he thought a lot about the slide setup, and he described each of the experiments that he’d done well, so that even though it was a technique that I’d never come across before and that is outside of my field of research, it was quite an informative talk, that I got a lot from it.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Absolutely. I think one of the best things about these conferences is actually not just learning about the science itself, but also the techniques that people are using. I think it’s a real opportunity, especially in person, to be able to find those people and say, oh, that was such a cool technique you use.

Dr Ian Harrison:

Yeah.

Dr Fiona McLean:

How can I use it? Can I use it? How do I do it? Are there any nuances that I need to know about? What I liked about his technique was he was using the eye, and I think the eye is actually underrated and under researched in Alzheimer’s research. And maybe this is bit biased from my perspective, but I’m interested in the blood brain barrier, and one of the only other places where there’s a similar type of barrier is actually in the retina. So I think for me, it’s really good to see that other people are recognizing the eye as a way to research the brain, especially because in people, we can actually look at the eye a lot more easier than the brain. So for me, I also really enjoyed that talk as well. So, does anyone else have any last highlights that they would like to point out?

Dr Soraya Meftah:

Actually, I have one last word, and it’s something I’ve written down, it was a quote that came out of the career session. And it was, I forget who said it now, Chris Mofatt said it, and he said that if science is your passion, and it’s something that’s keeping you up at night, and you manage to have a career in it, it’s one of the best careers you could ever have. And I thought that was quite a nice little line and I wrote it down because it was just one of those things that I hadn’t really thought about. Again, when you get narrowed down, but actually if you really enjoy it, and you’re really passionate about it, and you can make it work, then it is actually a very privileged career that we’re all in.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Absolutely. That was in the session that we’d just come out of, which was the careers panel. And Chris, who was a post-doc at Dundee, he also said something, another quote that I really liked, which was, sometimes you think the grass is greener on the other side, but it’s not, it’s just a different shade of green. And he was talking about his experience moving from academia to industry. I think that was actually, for me, I took that away because sometimes when things get tough you think, oh, is there another job out there that would be better? But actually, I think as you said, I mean, I love science, and we really are quite privileged to be able to think about these questions and be able to design experiments and try and answer them. I mean it’s such a fun thing actually, as well as, hopefully, solving some of the biggest problems that we face in the world.

So, yeah, I thought the careers panel was really fantastic as well. And Chris, especially him, he had some excellent quotes there. Another thing I know about Chris is, which he didn’t mention, which I’m quite disappointed about, is that actually he got stung when he was at Dundee by radioactive bee.

Dr Ian Harrison:

He’s got superpowers now.

Dr Fiona McLean:

He doesn’t have superpowers, but he did have to go to A&E, and they had to phone a specialist in Edinburgh to ask what to do.

Dr Ian Harrison:

I can imagine that.

Dr Fiona McLean:

And what they came to the conclusion was, I guess we’ll just wait and see.

Dr Ian Harrison:

It can’t be a very common presentation at clinic, right?

Dr Fiona McLean:

No, absolutely not. He’s definitely a case study somewhere. So yeah, he used to work with bees, and that’s his story. We’ll see him flying off to the poster conference drinks later, as he can now fly.

Before we wrap up, as this has been the ECR day, I want to ask you all what advice you might have for any ECRs listening, based on what you’ve heard today and your own experiences. So, let’s start with Ian.

Dr Ian Harrison:

Thanks. I would say, this might may seem obvious, but for ECRs, talk to people, mingle, talk to people at posters. I know because I’m a terrified introvert to talk to people at posters, but to find, and even at the rest of the sessions for the rest of the week, go and find that PI that you’ve read their work, go and find the post-docs and talk to them. Just introduce yourself, what interests you about their work, because it’s only things like this, that when we’ve come out, personally I’ve found, that we’ve come out of the pandemic coming back into in-person meetings, that’s the thing that I miss about in-person meetings.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Absolutely.

Dr Ian Harrison:

You just don’t get that from the virtual meetings that we’ve had. So, network.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Network.

Dr Ian Harrison:

Advice.

Dr Claire Durrant:

Network. I think just to add on a little tip onto the end of that, someone once told me that if you are struggling to be able to talk to a PI, find their post-doc or the PhD student and speak to them, and get them to introduce you. That’s your in.

Dr Fiona McLean:

That’s a great tip. And Soraya?

Dr Soraya Meftah:

I’ve got a different one, but I want to reiterate networking as well because I actually have friends at this conference now that I first started talking to them at a poster. I was like, “You do the same thing as me.” And then next year I’d see them, I’d be like, “Hey, we’re still doing the same things, how’s it going?” So, I would, especially at conferences, even just talking to someone at a poster, then it moves out of that space to being like, “Oh hey, actually now what are you doing?”

But my tip from today, and I mean, it’s already been highlighted, is to try and get a mentor. I’m very privileged to have Ian as one of mine from the program. I also have Fiona Care, who’s been also really lovely.

Dr Fiona McLean:

I love Fiona Care.

Dr Soraya Meftah:

Yeah, she’s so nice. And I think actually they’re opening the scheme again up soon, I think they mentioned at the start of the day. So, as long as you’re signed up to the ARUK network, you should get an email or something about it, or it’ll be on the portal, and I think it’s a really good scheme. So, yeah, that would be my top tip.

Dr Fiona McLean:

I think it’s important to mention that it’s free to join the ARUK networks, so there’s absolutely no excuse to not be part of them. Yeah, those are great tips as well. Thank you, Soraya. And yourself, Claire, what’s your advice?

Dr Claire Durrant:

Well, my two were kind of already stolen, but I have a third one, which is good. I think just use it to find your spark. And I’d say, I remember sitting here as a first year PhD student feeling quite overwhelmed at the, why am I here? I don’t know anything about Alzheimer’s Disease. I’m a first year, I have no clue what’s going on. But just know that you belong here and know that there is a place for you in research, and if you can’t see someone like you, be that person. So I think just make sure that you really feel you belong and carve your way, because we need you in Alzheimer’s disease research, so don’t doubt yourself.

Dr Fiona McLean:

Oh, I love that, Claire. I think it’s really important as well, is we really need diversity in research because it’s such a big problem. In Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia related diseases, we really need people who think in different ways to be able to solve this problem, and it’s the only way we’re going to get there is by lots of different people thinking about this problem in different ways. So, I completely think what you’ve said is great. So, thank you for that as well, Claire.

I also just realized, that I’m pretty sure, I met all three of you online during the pandemic at some point. And this is potentially the first time I’ve met you in person.

Dr Ian Harrison:

First time in a room together.

Dr Fiona McLean:

That’s lovely. Because I felt like I knew you when I walked in because we’d been on so many online things, but now we’re in a room together. Oh, that’s lovely.

That’s all we have time for today. We’re going to all go to the post-conference event for ECRs, but please stay tuned for the part two of the podcast, which is hosted by the amazing Dr. Zara Franklin, and her and guests will bring you the highlights from the rest of the conference. So thank you to my brilliant guest Dr. Claire Durrant, the amazing Ian Harrison, and incredible Dr. Soraya Meftah. And I’m Fiona McLean, and you have been listening to the Dementia Researcher Podcast.

Voice Over:

Brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society, Race Against Dementia, and the Alzheimer’s Association. Bringing you research, news, career tips, and support.

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