Relay Podcast - PIA to Elevate Early Career Researchers

Welcome to the seventh season of the Dementia Researcher X ISTAART PIA Relay Podcast. Across six episodes, leading early career and senior researchers hand the mic from one ISTAART PIA to the next, giving you an honest, peer-to-peer tour of where dementia research is actually heading, from wearables and biomarkers to policy and trial design, in the run-up to AAIC.

Most people with hypertension after 50 never develop dementia, so what separates those who do? That is the question driving Dr Sindhuja Tirumalai Govindarajan, a neuroimaging researcher and outgoing Chair of the ISTAART PEERs PIA, recorded as she moves from a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania to an assistant professorship at the Karolinska Institute. With host Dr Joe Kane she explains how machine learning on tens of thousands of MRI scans can pick up subtle brain changes years before symptoms, and why scans from different scanners have to be harmonised first. The conversation then turns to PEERs itself, a PIA built not around one research area but around early career researchers everywhere, and the work of levelling opportunity across borders through local routes like Neuroscience Next, WYLD and INTERDEM Academy. Sindhuja runs through the PIA's AAIC workshops, from narrative CVs to social bingo for ECRs, and closes with practical advice on getting people involved: make the ask specific.

Takeaways

• Machine learning on large MRI datasets can detect brain changes years before any cognitive symptoms show.
• Scans from different scanners must be harmonised first, stripping out machine noise so only the biology remains.
• PEERs exists to level opportunity for early career researchers wherever they are, across every research area.
• Local routes such as Neuroscience Next, WYLD and INTERDEM Academy widen access for those who cannot get to the big conference.
• Interest among ECRs is common but clarity often is not, so make the ask specific and people will step up.

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The Alzheimer’s Association International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment (ISTAART) convenes the global Alzheimer’s and dementia science community. Members share knowledge, fuel collaboration and advance research to find more effective ways to detect, treat and prevent Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Professional Interest Areas (PIA) are an assembly of ISTAART members with common subspecialties or interests.

There are currently 30 PIAs covering a wide range of interests and fields, from Neuroimaging to Diversity and Disparities and everything in between.

Find out more at https://istaart.alz.org/

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