Academic collaborations shape most research careers, yet few researchers are ever taught how to start one, who to trust, or what needs agreeing before the work begins.

Adam Smith is joined by Dr Sarah Marzi, Reader in Neurogenomics at the UK Dementia Research Institute at King's College London, and Professor Georgina Charlesworth, Professor of Clinical Psychology of Ageing and Dementia at UCL and joint lead of the SPIN-D Network+. Also joining are Professor Nathan Davies, Professor of Ageing and Applied Health and Care Research at Queen Mary University of London and co-director of the Alzheimer's Society Doctoral Training Centre for Integrated Dementia Care, and Dr Amanda Heslegrave, Principal Research Fellow at the UK DRI at UCL and co-lead of the UK DRI Biomarker Factory. Between them they run an international research partnership, a national network with around 35 named co-applicants, a doctoral training centre across five universities, and a shared biomarker platform working with research teams across many projects.

The conversation follows a collaboration from first contact to final paper. It starts with how partnerships begin, often from a conference conversation or an email about data, and who should be on the application. It moves on to how to tell genuine collaboration from a request for a service, and how leadership, writing and credit are divided once the work is funded. The guests also talk about what happens when things go wrong, from partners who stop replying before a deadline to difficult meetings that leave early career researchers unsupported.

Their experience points to the same conclusion. Collaborations work best when leadership, contribution, behaviour and authorship are discussed early and revisited as the work changes.

In this episode:

• How good collaborations begin, often with an email, a conference talk or someone admitting they need help
• Who should be on a grant application, and how large networks decide who stays involved
• What to do when the people you approach are planning to lead the same bid
• How specialist labs and shared platforms tell genuine collaboration from a request for a service
• Who should write a multi-institution grant, and how to share leadership without duplicating every decision
• When to discuss authorship, and why it needs revisiting as contributions change
• How to handle collaborators who miss deadlines, go silent or will not approve a final draft
• Why agreed standards of behaviour protect early career researchers in collaborative and PPI meetings

Essential links / resources mentioned in the show:

• Team EMERALD
• Dementia Frontiers Fund
• The 100-plus Study
• UK DRI Biomarker Factory
• SPIN-D Network+
• INTERDEM
• Alzheimer's Society Doctoral Training Centre for Integrated Care
• UK DRI Biomarker Factory

--

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Hello and welcome to the Dementia Researcher podcast.

Today we're talking about the bit of research that everybody says matters, but very

few people are actually taught how to do, which is working with other people.

Hello, I'm Adam Smith. I'm the programme director for Dementia Researcher, and I'm

delighted to be hosting today's show.

We have forever been told that research is a team sport, and it's a lovely phrase

right up until when you're trying to get twelve co-investigators to finish something

and agree.

At its best, collaboration gives an idea expertise, reach, and energy that no one

person could ever possibly provide. But at its worst, it creates more meetings, less

clarity, and a great deal of invisible work for whoever is organised enough to pick

it up.

So this is not a show about how to collect names that will look great on a grant

application. What we really want to know is how good partnerships really start and

how you decide who to trust and what needs saying before the grant or paper gets

underway.

I'm joined today by four people

whose working lives are dependent upon collaborations, but in very different forms.

We have the incredible Dr. Sarah Marzi, who is a reader in neurogenomics at the UK

Dementia Research Institute and a group leader at King's College London.

Her work combines experimental and computational genomics.

And has involved international teams and major collaborative programmes, including

as part of the Dementia Frontiers Fund and the Aligning Science Across Parkinson's

Network. Hi Sarah, thank you for joining us.

Hello, hello.

Again, of course, you've been on the podcast lots of times before.

Lots of times.

And joining Sarah, we have first time on the podcast, Georgina Charlesworth, who is

a professor of clinical psychology of ageing and dementia at University College

London. She jointly leads the SPIN-D Network Plus, which connects researchers,

practitioners, communities of people affected by dementia across the UK.

Hi, Georgina.

Hi.

Next, we have Professor

Nathan Davies, who is Centre Co-Lead and Professor of Ageing and Applied Health and

Care Research at Queen Mary University of London.

He is a principal investigator and co-director of the Alzheimer's Society Doctoral

Training Centre for Integrated Dementia Care, an eight-year partnership involving

five universities and 29 PhD students. Hi, Nathan.

Hi.

I don't think you've been on the podcast before, but we've done live streams

together, right?

We did something once during COVID-19. I don't know if that was a podcast or a live

stream. I can't remember.

Well, thank you very much for joining us today.

And joining us to make up our fourth guest is another regular face you'll have seen

before, who is the amazing Dr. Amanda Heslegrave, who is a principal research fellow

at the UK Dementia Research Institute, also at UCL.

She co-leads the Fluid Biomarker Laboratory and the UK DRI Biomarker Factory, a

shared platform built around supporting and connecting research across many projects

and disease areas. Hi, Amanda.

Hello, nice to be back.

You're all brilliant and I'm really grateful for you all taking time out to join me

today.

So before we start properly, could each of you introduce yourself in just one or two

sentences and name the collaboration, team, or shared project

that's currently taking up the most space in your head?

And Sarah, I'm gonna come to you first.

All right, yeah, so I'm Sarah Marzi. I'm an epigeneticist working on

neurodegenerative diseases to figure out how environmental and genetic risk factors

predispose our brains to neurodegeneration. And we've just recently been awarded

funding from the Dementia Frontiers Fund as part of our team, Emerald, together with

Professor Henne Holstege in the Netherlands and Dr.

Alexi Nott at Imperial College. And there's a lot of paperwork.

contracting, recruitment, setting up and getting ready for a project start in

November that's going on right now. So that's very present on my mind.

Brilliant. Thank you. And I'm looking forward to getting into the story behind that.

Because when I saw the big news about that, the announcement about that a few weeks

ago, I thought, ooh, there's gotta be a story behind that collaboration.

Thank you, Sarah.

Georgina, let's come to you next.

Hi, I'm Georgina. I'm a psychologist. I've been at UCL for 25 years now, and the

collaboration that I'm particularly involved with at the moment is SPIN-D, as you

mentioned before, which is Sustainable Prevention, Innovation and Involvement

Network for Dementia, which is one of the Dementia Network Pluses.

It has on our grant

I think about thirty-five different named co-applicants that involves not only sort

of university academics but also community partners and from sixteen different

organisations.

I'm not gonna use the phrase herding cats 'cause I'm sure they're all amazing and

nothing at all like cats, but I can't wait to learn more about that.

And Nathan.

Hi, I'm Nathan Davies. So I'm a professor of ageing based at Queen Mary.

And I've been here for about two years now. And prior to that, I was also at UCL for

about 15 years. And I do applied dementia care research, so both health and social

care. And I think probably the one taking up most of my time at the moment is the

iCARE Doctoral Training Centre. So like you said, Adam, that's quite a large piece

of work over eight years with five different universities and just under 30

students. So it's quite a beast.

I feel like we could even do a separate show here on how many collaborations is too

many, you know.

But thank you very much, Nathan and Amanda.

So hi, I've been now working on biomarkers for neurodegenerative disease for about

14 years here. But really, I think since the Dementia Research Institute started,

it's really ramped up in the amount of collaborations and the amount of people that

we work with. And I'm going to say, I look at most of what we do, 95% of what we do

is collaboration. So

we can't function without those collaborators.

So it is my job to have all of them taking up my mind all of the time and so it's

really difficult to answer one but I will say one thing that quite excited me

recently even though it was quite painful was being asked to be a part of a Horizon

Europe grant which at the time I

thought about the people trying to organise it all and felt quite sorry for them but

actually they did it really well because it was awarded to look at the exposome,

that's what it is, anything we're exposed to and how that affects brain health and

so we've got the biomarker part of that so yeah thinking about that quite a lot,

looking forward to it.

Wow. Thank you, Amanda. I'm interested. I have got a question.

I'm gonna come back straight in to you. You're gonna get a question now, which is

how much of your time is doing your own research as opposed to being supporting so

many other people's?

Yeah, I mean, I suppose that depends on how I look at all that research because we

have so many close collaborations, like with the clinical team at the Dementia

Research Centre, people in different DRI centres, such as the TBI people.

So I consider, I've worked on a number of these things for years now, so consider

that mine as well. But in terms of

I have one PhD student at the moment looking at different methods of remote sampling

to make it easier, cheaper to measure blood-based biomarkers.

And I spend, yeah, probably not enough time on that because I have a lot of other

commitments to fulfil.

And I suppose it is really your own research, 'cause at some point anybody else's

study that's got a biomarker element, they just trust you to do that, which is your

own research. And they don't tell you what to do.

You design it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Fantastic. Thank you very much.

So to start, I'd like to talk about the bit before the grant application and think

about how good collaborations actually begin.

It feels like most worthwhile collaborations begin with an informal connection,

someone you meet after a talk or an introduction or a paper you can't stop thinking

about, or somebody admitting that they need some help.

So Sarah, I'm gonna come to you first. Tell us about a collaboration that began

quite casually and became something much bigger.

So I would like to give the example of actually Alexi Nott, who I mentioned earlier,

and I first met Alexi in 2020 during COVID online when I tried to use some of his

data from his amazing Science paper on cell type specific epigenomes, and I had

emailed him

and he just asked if I wanted to have a chat because we were both working in the

same field. So, you know, we met on Zoom, and he hinted that he was on the job

market and actually interviewing across the US.

And I knew that the UK DRI at Imperial was still looking to recruit maybe one or two

more people. So I actually put him in touch with the director at the time and put in

a good word for him. And yeah, that's how he ended up at Imperial, and then we

shared a lot of the same experiences going through setting up our early labs

together, and we work on quite similar things, although he comes at it from a

background that's more based on molecular biology, genetics, genomics in his

training and PhD postdoc, whereas my own background is more from the quantitative

side originally. And now we sort of span that whole spectrum, both of us, but we are

very complementary because our original training and PhDs,

deep expertise sort of comes from the two different directions.

And with him, yeah, we've run multiple studies together, but just in the last 18

months we've received two major grants together, one from the UK DRI, the Key

Questions Scheme, and then the other grant is the Dementia Frontiers Fund Emerald

project that I just mentioned, which is looking at resilience and studying

centenarians from the 100-plus Study that

Henne Holstege runs in Amsterdam, and really looking at what makes them so

remarkably resilient to dementia and cognitive decline.

What made you think, what was it about Alexi that made you think,

this is somebody I want to work with?

So the first contact was because I thought the science was so exciting, what he was

doing and how he was doing it, and also going all the way from sort of the

statistical big picture epigenetic annotation to really functionally validating a

specific enhancer that's in a genetic locus linked to Alzheimer's and showing that

it has an effect that is specific to microglia.

So bridging that

whole field, if you will. But then knowing him now for many years, he's a wonderful

person, really kind and smart and trustworthy.

And we also work very, very well together. And we've written a few grants together

now and it's one of my best experiences because somehow we're constantly in touch

and we're pushing each other and we're complementing our writing.

So things actually get done pretty quickly when we work together and that's

been really nice. And because we know each other so well, we can also check in

really frequently and conversations about, you know, leadership roles, authorships

or difficult topics are easier because we have that level of, yeah, knowing each

other well and trusting each other.

And do you work at the same level? Are you the kind of same grade?

Are you at the same institution? Do you

Well, not the same institution anymore because I moved to King's College, but pretty

much the same stage. We've had our group for the same amount of time, progressed in

similar stages through the academic ranks. And so really the projects that we lead

together quite often will be very equal contribution co-led projects.

And you mentioned the Netherlands, the centenarians work there.

How did that come about?

Yeah, so I met Henne several years ago, maybe three years ago or so at a neuroimmune

consortium meeting. It's this broader consortium that we're both part of.

And I gave a talk on our research into epigenetics in microglia in the context of

Alzheimer's. And Henne has been collecting a lot of different layers of omics and

functional annotation on

centenarians, both the blood samples that are collected throughout the longitudinal

study, but also there's a substantial subset of these centenarians who will go on to

donate their brains to research. And so really looking at those brains as well, and

there's a lot of proteomics and RNA sequencing and different things going on.

But she always thought that epigenetics was a key missing link in that picture

because it can let us link the genetic variants, which are largely non-coding,

directly to the gene regulatory functional mechanism, which cell types are they

active in, and which genes do they contact downstream with 3D chromatin

conformation. And so it's been something she had been thinking about.

And when she saw my talk, she was excited and she came up to me and we had

our first chat and have been sort of casually chatting since then and kind of

waiting for the right opportunity and right grant call to actually apply to, and

this one seemed really perfect because one of the focus questions was resilience.

And yeah, it's been a whirlwind because it's a very accelerated grant funding

scheme. So from writing it to interviewing to the announcement, it was all

accelerated timelines, but

it's been really exciting and a wonderful experience so far.

So the birth of that again comes back to, as I said in my introduction, I guess,

that you gave a talk somewhere, somebody spoke to you afterwards.

Yes. That's right.

I might pick you all up on that and see if that's happened to everybody.

Because that makes a great case for saying, you know, go to conferences,

present, follow up on those connections that we're always telling people to do,

isn't it? Thank you very much, Sarah. And Georgina, you've been very patient waiting

there. SPIN-D has to bring together researchers and people affected by dementia and

practitioners and community organisations across all of those four nations.

When you build something that kind of broad, how do you decide who actually needs to

be on the application, in the room?

Well, for that particular grant, it was Chris Fox who first started looking into

developing it. And he has a particular way of doing this.

Probably I ought to let him explain it himself, but as he isn't here, I'll tell you

his method. He just invites everybody who he can think of, who he thinks might be

relevant to a particular bid, sees who turns up and then sees who's still there a

few meetings down the line in the development.

And then works out whether there's any sort of missing skills or expertise that

requires some additional invitations to sort of bring them in.

So that seems to be sort of his approach for doing things.

I think for most of the bids that I'd been involved in before then, we were either

more local collaborations with people that we already knew, or thinking of what

Amanda was saying about the Horizon bid,

being part of a pan-European group, so already being part of a network of interest

on psychosocial interventions for people with dementia, and then there being those

sort of cross-European collaborations. But I should perhaps say that as somebody who

spent a lot of time in the NHS as a psychologist and then between academia and that

as clinical base,

but for the SPIN-D project, obviously we were looking to make sure we had

representatives from all of the stakeholder groups that we thought were going to be

sort of relevant to that particular call. So start.

That does sound

highly risky if you start with a kind of big mailing list of let's just get this out

there to fifty people. If it turns out everybody comes back and says, yes, you've

then got the awkward thing of saying, by the way, we're dropping you off.

Like you were included on the original, but now we've got too many people.

Or do you start to grade

people and say, right, you're the core team, you're the

But no no no, Adam, you've got to remember that people are busy, they've got stuff

on. People are available, people are not available, people are really interested in

a topic, people have other priorities. And I don't know, you'd have to ask Chris

what his hit rate is, or whether there's been occasions when he's then needed to

pare things down using his approach. But for SPIN-D in particular, we started with a

big group by the time we had established who was interested.

We then retained a big group because this was a network rather than a specific

research

project. So if we knew that we had a particular work programme that we were wanting

to follow in terms of research delivery, we might have gone about it in a slightly

different way from where we were just wanting to make sure that we had a really

broad

network so there were lots of people with lots of fingers in lots of pies in order

to try to continue or further build sort of collaborations between different

sectors.

Thank you, Georgina. Nathan, I'm gonna come to you now.

iCARE, we said in the introduction, brings together five universities for, is it

eight

years? This is a long-term thing and responsible for developing twenty-nine doctoral

researchers. Take us back to the beginning. Where did the idea come from and how did

that kind of first core team come together?

As similar to what Georgina is saying, it's quite different when you're pulling

together a research grant or a project idea as compared to a network or a doctoral

training centre. So it was quite tricky actually to think about what is the idea or

the glue that holds it all together really. So we had ideas about what we wanted it

to include. So we wanted stuff on inequalities, we want to think about

co-production. I was really interested in end of life.

But what was it that was holding all that together?

And, you know, integration is this kind of wicked problem, isn't it?

How do you get integrated care across health and social care, across different parts

of care? So that seemed to be a very appealing topic and something that the

Alzheimer's Society had also highlighted. So they gave quite a bit of steer, I would

say, in the early days, they wanted it to be around the four transitions or five

transitions that they had just launched around then as well.

So we had quite a good steer.

I think I was at a time where I really wanted to lead something big.

I wanted to do something big and something different as well.

And I felt like a doctoral training centre, when this came up, I thought this sounds

like a fantastic idea. Working with the Alzheimer's Society, I'd had a postdoc with

them, I'd done multiple grants. So thought this was a really exciting time.

And they were also really clear they wanted it to be a national programme.

They didn't want it to be just based at one university, they wanted it to be

national.

And again, I thought that was a really exciting time to pull together lots of

different people from, again, like Georgina was saying, lots of different expertise,

lots of different disciplines, different people, experiences.

And so I remember reaching out to Claudia Cooper at the time and saying, I was

really keen to do this. And I'd spoken to a couple of colleagues at UCL as well.

And then it just kind of snowballed as to who we thought were some of the kind of

key players who had experience in this kind of realm of leading doctoral

centres or doing lots of PhD supervision and having really interesting pieces of

work that we thought would be good to explore.

And so that just led on to further conversations, further discussions, and the

integration theme then came from all those initial discussions.

And we went to a few different meetings with various groups of people, not everyone

joined in the end, because there was lots that you can imagine, as we've all in this

room been.

This was a national call. There was a lot of people going for this, a lot of

competition. And so, you know, people did their own thing as well.

So it was, yeah, it was an interesting time, I would say.

Well actually you've just picked up on something at the end there that I was gonna

ask you about. And this might be something you've all experienced, is when you first

start out to think, right, I'm going to lead an application on this, and you go

reaching out to people to suddenly find that the people you're approaching are also

planning to apply for that same thing. And so is there an honest conversation to

say, well, okay, good luck, I'll go my way, you go your way, or, you know,

how do you decide whether to team up or to go your separate ways?

Yeah, absolutely. There were quite a lot of honest conversations in the approach

with this one. And I was quite clear I would like to lead, but it wasn't contingent

that I had to be the lead or, you know, that I wouldn't be on someone else's instead

of leading my own. But you know, I think it's important to be honest and upfront

when we do these things and just put your cards on the table and, you know, what are

you looking to get out of that? And that worked

this time round, I think. You know, people who were potentially interested in

leading said, I'm happy to support you, I don't need to lead this, I'm not worried.

And then other people said, we would like to lead this from ours.

And then in the end, you know, after discussions, it was clear that there were two

different bids. They weren't necessarily bids that could be merged or wanted to be

merged really. So I think it's about having those open, honest conversations.

And we're all used to having those kinds of conversations.

So I don't think it's

a bad thing or a too difficult thing to do.

I think also as well, the way that grant application processes seem to have been

refined over the last couple of years, particularly, is that with this letter of

intent stage or this expression of interest stage, the funders are getting more

proactive in intervening part way through. So rather than having lots of people

submit a grant application and have to reject them, they kind of reserve the ability

to say, hey,

can we tell this other person that you, and kind of encourage you to go together and

team up?

Amanda, you've been very patient. I know that people often approach a specialist lab

like yours or a shared platform because they need an assay or they need a result.

How do you tell the difference between kind of genuine scientific collaboration and

transactional requests dressed up as collaboration?

Because you must get quite a few of those.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people, or the people that are probably easiest to

work with, are the people that engage with me, that will meet and want to meet and

talk about their project and perhaps do a little presentation, show us what it is

that they're doing. And then rather than just say, I've got a thousand samples I'm

going to bring around next Monday, you know, like so

you can tell quite easily who's going to be a part of it as well.

And often, and I quite like this because it's helpful to my team as well, their

junior researcher will come along and be a part of the assays that they're doing

because sometimes I think it's really important that they know what happened and

what we were doing and why we insist on certain pre-analytical requirements.

So yeah, I

feel like I'm fairly good now at telling who really wants to work with us and who

just wants us to work for them. Yeah.

To buy a service. I mean,

I know we've chatted before that you get so many requests.

Are there a kind of set of questions that you ask now before you say yes to

anything?

I suppose, have you got the money? It's really important actually because a lot of

people are quite shocked that we won't just measure things for free, which is kind

of a bit old school I think. But no, do you know what?

I think partly the reason we've got so many collaborations is that I say yes.

Mostly I just say yes and then see where it goes, which

can mean that I have some stressful times but most of the time it proves to be quite

fun actually.

So you heard it here first, listeners. Amanda says yes.

That's amanda.heslegrave at... yeah. Thank you very

I learned it from my boss.

much, Amanda. I'm gonna finish this first section here, which has been a long

section, with a quick one, kind of one question to all of you, and I do want speedy

answers. If you could choose between a big name

or technical expertise or somebody you just trust to deliver on time, which are you

gonna go for? And I'm gonna go to you first, Amanda.

Number two, the technical expert, the person I could trust to deliver.

The big names are very frustrating at times. Apologies any big names who are

listening, they're probably not though.

What about you, Nathan?

Same. Someone I trust that I know will deliver.

Georgina.

Yeah, yeah, I'm the same too, the technical expertise and the person you trust.

Yeah.

Somebody who's gonna deliver on it. Sarah, you've got to say something different

now. You can't go with the

I've got to say something

different, I know. I mean, now I probably agree with this, but I have found in the

very early stages of my independent career that big names can open quite some very

locked doors that as an early career PI you wouldn't have access to, and can really

change how your application is perceived. And they often come with a reputation,

right? If someone evaluates a grant, for example, and there is

someone with a stellar track record of delivering amazing results and projects on

there, that gives them confidence that it can be done again.

Yeah. And be prepared for the fact though that any of those big names, they might

not be the big name and the person that Nathan, Georgina and Amanda just mentioned

there.

But I absolutely agree with that. Thank you very much.

So to start this next section, I want to give you all a bit of a hypothetical.

In your head, you've designed the perfect collaboration.

Then you have to write the email and make the introduction or ask for the meeting

without sounding vague or demanding, and also as well, don't want to appear like the

deadline is next Friday and they're sending this email on Monday, like you've just

remembered they'd be good. I get a lot of emails like that.

So Sarah, I'm gonna come to you first. Your work crosses wet lab biology, genomics,

statistics, computation. How do you approach someone whose expertise you need when

you don't yet know enough about their field to frame the kind of perfect question?

Yeah,

I'm gonna have to slightly redirect the question.

I don't really do a lot of cold calling on people and I would never design a project

and only then contact someone to ask them about it.

So I would maybe cold call to develop something together, but then both of us

involved in the design process. Or when it's about bringing new technical expertise

to my field,

I also never wanted to feel like someone is giving me something for free or it's a

service where they're teaching us something. So it's often really collaborative.

And only with people that I've had long-standing work relationships and trusted

collaborations with might I ask for advice or like, can I send someone to your lab

to learn something? And one example is my lab has taken on over the last 18 months

or so iPSC modelling as a new thing. So before

we did a lot of work on post-mortem brain or we collaborated with others to do the

cell and animal models and now we do some of the cell modelling in-house and you

have to start somewhere. So also you hire people with that experience.

But what really helped is that we're embedded at King's College in a department

where several people are doing iPSC modelling, particularly for ALS and modelling

cortical and motor neurons. People that I have now ongoing collaborations with, so

then it doesn't feel so transactional.

For example, I've taken on a jointly supervised PhD student and that's really co-led

by two groups that are producing that work together.

So that's a good point actually. So if you do notice that you've got a kind of

skills gap when you start to build your grant, is

maybe first of all to look internally to colleagues who are immediately around

you, who you at least have some tenuous connection with 'cause you work at the same

place, rather than somebody somewhere else who you've maybe never met but have just

seen their papers or read their reputation.

Yeah, exactly. I think that helps. I never wanted to feel like I'm just

transactionally asking for something from someone who's a scientist and a leader in

their own field.

Thank you very much. Amanda, I feel like my question here might be a little bit like

the one you've already answered, but you receive plenty of approaches.

What makes an invitation easy to say yes to? And what makes you suspicious?

Obviously you said money before. They're gonna pay you.

No,

easy to respond to is when they actually have done a little bit of research and they

know what we do, rather than assume that we're something else.

We get lots of people coming to us saying, I want to send my samples one at a time

and I want the results with cutoffs. That's a clinical lab.

That's not what we are. We're a research lab. So you don't know what we do.

So that would be

my quick answer to that.

So make sure you've done your background processing, you understand.

And if

they... obviously, is that available? I mean, can people find that out about you

without having to talk to you?

Absolutely,

they can look us up. There's a webpage somewhere, I think.

Hopefully it's up to date. But it certainly is going to say that we're a research

lab, you know, and there's kind of technologies that we have as well.

So, you know, people should be able to find that out.

So make sure you've done your background reading, that you're approaching somebody

with a request that is actually reasonable.

Yeah. And Nathan, when you're assembling a grant team, how formed do you think the

idea needs to be before you invite people in? 'Cause of course too early and there's

nothing to react to, and too late and it doesn't really feel like collaboration

anymore.

Yeah, exactly. So I think it varies. I think you need to have an idea, a top level

idea of what it is you're looking to do. And then I think have those conversations

with people that you know would be interested in that field or potential areas that

you'd be exploring to make sure you develop it together, because otherwise you're

not going to have their proper buy-in because you've just developed a project, it's

your idea, you kind of have that ownership and you want ownership across the team

and for people to buy into it and

feel like they're part of it, they show up to the meetings.

There's nothing worse than having collaborators that just come on board and then you

never see them. So I think having it, you know, from the start, as early as

possible. But in saying that as well, you sometimes get, you know, quite a way

through the development plan of it, and you realise that you're missing something,

you're missing expertise and

you hadn't really thought of it and you need to pull someone else in who can help

you understand and unpick that area a little bit more.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that either.

But, you know, ultimately you want most of your people quite early on.

I suppose in that case you just have to be honest, don't you?

In saying, look,

we've got this application, it's quite formed already, but we realised we had this

gap. We thought... bit of flattery doesn't go amiss either, does it?

You

would be amazing to bring in on this.

I think the worst is when you get a funding panel tell you you're missing a specific

expertise. It's normally a clinical expertise that the panel tell you you're

missing, and then you get an email off someone saying, the funding panel has told me

I have to have someone like you. Well, that's not really flattery, so I think it's

about approaching the right people as early as possible, but, you know, being honest

about it as well.

And what I feel is appropriate to bring in there, of course, is that patient and

public involvement part and that kind of co-production, who, you know, I know from

experience are very passionate about being as involved in that process as early as

possible. Have you ever had an experience where doing that has fundamentally changed

the... 'cause of course, as we said at the start, you've got in your head what the

perfect team looks like, what your study looks like, but

sometimes bringing collaborators in can change that direction and not always

necessarily in the way you wanted to go. How have you handled that before?

Yeah, I think that happens quite a bit with PPI actually, because you go to them

with your kind of grand idea that you think is going to change the world or change

the face of dementia care, and then your PPI will tell you, well that's just not

gonna work. That's nonsense, you know, that wouldn't have worked for my husband when

he had dementia. And I think it's really important to listen to that and take that

on board. And that's the bits that I think are the most exciting, is going back and

changing. It's this iterative process.

And the same thing with collaborators and co-applicants as well.

And you know, for me, I'm not a big data person, you know, I'm much more comfortable

with qualitative research. But you know, I do a lot of mixed methods and I might put

something together and say, we could do this. And then the data person comes in and

says, are you crazy? That's not possible. You can't do that.

So I think, you know, that's part of the fun of it, I think, and the creativity that

comes with it.

That sounds like what Sarah says to people when [inaudible] comes.

Thank you, Nathan. And Georgina, you've mentioned the NHS a few times there.

What changes when a collaborator is an NHS service or a community organisation?

Because you don't just work with researchers, you kind of work with whole

organisations or services, not just academics.

What changes about that dynamic?

The most important thing to remember is that they have a completely different set of

priorities. The priority absolutely is not doing groundbreaking research that's

going to be published in any particular journal.

It's to serve the people that are users of that service.

And so it makes a difference to timescales, to the focus, to

the kind of research designs that people are willing to sort of jump on board and

get involved with. And we've mentioned money already, Amanda mentioned money.

And most organisations that are service providers are really short of cash.

And something that we've found really challenging is finding a way to try to make

sure that universities pay in a timely way to

organisations that absolutely don't have the funds to keep them going if they've

been promised money but it isn't coming in.

And do you find that,

say, for example, you're involving a not-for-profit organisation, do you have to

kind of buy in more to the idea that you're inviting them as an organisation rather

than an individual? And have you had examples where the person then changes?

It isn't always necessarily the same person who pitches up, because they're

representing that group.

Yes. Yes. The answer is we've definitely sort of had that experience, well, I won't

say especially where, but yes, it can easily happen that you have started the

negotiations with an individual who then has a change of role or retires or who

moves to a different organisation, and then you find you're sort of starting from

the beginning with somebody else within that organisation

who might have quite a different sort of perspective on what's going on, but you

kind of just need to sort of roll with it and find a way to sort of make the

connection and work out how to still have a meaningful and useful sort of

collaboration, or decide whether in actual fact there needs to be a sort of parting

of the ways on that particular project, but re-engage for something else in the

future.

I was gonna say, I guess in those instances it might be that that organisation drops

out because maybe that person's role isn't existing in the new structure.

They're leaving and there is nobody to replace them.

So I'm gonna end this section by asking everybody this slightly tongue-in-cheek

question, which is what is the fastest way for a collaboration invitation to lose

your interest? And I'm gonna go to you first, Sarah.

I mean I think it's something that we've already mentioned.

It's when it sounds like you're providing a service, and in my case it would often

be around data analysis and statistics. So yeah.

What about you, Georgina?

I think anything that's really long but you're still not quite sure at the end of it

what exactly it's asking for. And then the other thing that we've had since we've

had the SPIN-D network, which involves a kind of core lived experience group, is

people just saying, can you provide a PPI person?

You know, as if they're a commodity to be handed over.

That doesn't sit well either.

And Nathan, then Amanda.

I quite often get asked if I'll lead PPI. And I don't think I'm the person who

should be leading PPI. I think it should be the PPI leading that.

So

And for me it's going to be when people email Henrik and then say, if he can't do

it, would you? You can be the bonus prize or whatever, so that's the way to make me

lose interest.

When you are the second choice. Yeah, I can get

that. That's Henrik Zetterberg, of course. Yeah.

Thank you very much.

So we know now what a friendly conversation can do.

It can get a project started, but it can't run one.

At some point, the enthusiasm has to become names against tasks and budgets and

decisions and an understanding of who gets credit for what.

Nathan, on a big grant involving several institutions, who actually writes it?

And how do you stop collaborative drafting becoming something that 20

people add comments while one exhausted person does all the work?

I think people do it differently. People work in different ways, don't they?

And I think you need to find the way that works for you and the people that you've

got around you. I think ultimately one person is going to be responsible for the

whole thing, because otherwise it will just look like a mismatch and like it's just

been slapped together. So someone does need to take the whole overall lead and write

the overall thing. But I think carving it up into

constituent parts that people can take charge of and feel like they own a part of

it, I think that's the right approach. So, you know, if we have work packages, you

put down work package leads, and a lot of the time they have been nominal work

package leads traditionally. But actually I think we've got a lot better in research

now, where, you know, work package leads are work package leads and they write that

part and they lead that part throughout the programme or the project as well.

So

it should be a collaborative effort, but ultimately that one person does need to

make sure it all joins up.

That's it, isn't it? It's a lot easier then if it's just one person trying to find

the angle that strings all these work packages together.

And also as well, I don't know, do you find that...

I don't just want a comment. If you want something changed, tell me what you want it

changed to, that I can then agree to, not just

a comment.

I think that's particularly important if it's a methodological comment as well,

where they say, you know, you haven't really incorporated this part of

implementation theory, or you need to think about this analysis.

I don't have that expertise. So, you know, you're gonna need to write that for me.

That's why you're part of this bid, you bring that expertise.

But I think that's about having conversations very early on,

you know, when you're writing the bid, how are we going to work together?

So have those regular meetings. So it's not just about writing it as well, but it's

about coming together as a team and having discussions, conversations and ways of

working as well. All easier said than done, but this is how it should be, I think.

Yeah, getting round the table, getting in a room together

to do that. Thank you. And Georgina, as you've touched on, you jointly lead a very

large network with your fantastic colleague Chris Fox.

How do you make co-leadership work without either duplicating every decision or

leaving people unsure as to who's responsible?

Well, we try to have a system and I'm not sure we get it right every time, but we

keep finding a way to sort of discuss those sorts of things.

So for the particular network that we're involved with, we know that the finance is

in Chris's institution and at UCL I only have the money for what's going on at UCL.

So ultimately the financial stuff is based in Exeter.

So

you follow the money for that. And the project manager similarly is there.

So we've got some quite clear areas of responsibility.

Nathan had also mentioned different sort of work packages and work streams and who

leads those. So we try to sort of be clear about who's leading which particular sort

of activity. But a lot of it just involves making sure that you're in contact and

know who's doing what. And so we will have a

meeting each week just to see what sorts of requests have come up, what sorts of

things have been asked, what emails we've been receiving, just so that we have an

idea of what the other's doing and saying. And then it's me that meets up with the

operational leads, the administrator and the network manager, to then consider how

we put in practice the set of principles that we try to have behind all of our

decisions. So for all of our activities,

we try to make sure that there's co-production, that it involves early career

researchers and involves multiple stakeholder groups, not necessarily all of them

all the time, but that there's more than one group.

And so whenever we're doing our decisions, we try to make sure that those sorts of

principles have been taken into account as well.

Yeah, that makes

sense. And it's kind of agreeing up front. Nathan, you talked about work packages,

but almost dividing down leadership to say, right, these are the bits you're gonna

take care of, these are the bits I am. Thank you, Georgina.

And

In the network, we also try to make sure that we're clear about who has freedom to

operate around what, because the network is very big and very sprawly.

And the idea is that it should get bigger as well.

And so we

can't have absolutely everything coming back to the two of us, or we'd never get

anywhere. So we've tried to be clear about when people can, you know, take their own

decisions about different activities rather than needing to check in for absolutely

everything all the time. So when do they need to check in?

And when can they just let us know afterwards what the decisions were?

Yeah. So agreeing those things in advance, which actually leads me nicely to your

question, Amanda. So before, you know, any kind of samples reach the Biomarker

Factory, what needs to actually be agreed in advance?

Yeah, so we do have, because in order to get money from people, we have to treat it

as a service. So we actually have a service agreement and this lays down very

clearly who's responsible for what. For example, even the samples, when we finish

with them, what happens to them, or that they endeavour to make sure there's no

infectious diseases, you know, to their knowledge, in the samples they're sending

us. But I mean, beyond that,

the conversations that I have with people go right to the start of projects and the

way they collect samples. And that's where I see the collaborative value of us is

that, yeah, your samples, once you've got them, and many of them are historical,

they are what they are. We have an agreement. We do what we say we'll do and job

done. And then we also have an agreement that we are acknowledged

in the manuscript that results from these studies, and often with authorship, but,

you know, I would talk about that to decide what's warranted.

I mean oftentimes if people have no knowledge of what they're doing with biomarkers

then my team will be acknowledged in there because they are the ones that randomise

the samples, that made sure that their results were meaningful.

So yeah, so there's different levels

of requirements, and there are people that still snuck through and not acknowledged

us at all and then come back for advice, which doesn't go down very well, I'm going

to say.

Do you have a template? 'Cause I'm guessing you must have a template kind of for

this now, and that some of that's evolved over time because when you first started

out you probably didn't necessarily have all

No, in the beginning, people would just send their samples to us and that was that.

And then we would use our own money in the beginning.

Those were the days. But as the Biomarker Factory has evolved, it's meant that we've

had to formalise everything. The document is

signed by UCL Legal, you know, they're the people who put it together, and there are

no changes to be made to it now. But things are still evolving in the way that we

work with people, which is only for the better actually, because we're more

experienced now. And now we're able to kind of work up plans with people who want to

do clinical trial samples, etc. So, you know, the remit is widening.

Yeah. Thank you. And Sarah, papers can create their own kind of version of the same

problem, I think, as Amanda's

just touched on. At what point do you discuss authorship and contribution, and how

do you revisit that as a kind of project evolves and, you know, what you thought at

the start might not be what turns out at the end?

Yeah, so I think, I mean, generally early is good.

I wouldn't say I do it at the very start of a collaboration because that would be

slightly preposterous, to already think about what the hypothetical exact paper is

that comes out of it. But as you are generating output and in your mind the

structure of a paper starts to form, that's probably a good time to start discussing

this, and

sometimes it's quite clear that there is a person that has managed everyone else and

led efforts, and it's still worthwhile speaking with the other senior people and

just ensuring that they're on board with that.

And I think that's the person that has the ultimate responsibility of managing the

politics behind the authorship. Sometimes it's a more genuine joint effort and,

as a very collaborative researcher, I think joint firsts and joint senior

authorships are something great and something that reflects actual contributions and

actual collaborative work. So I'm always a fan of that when there are equal

contributions. And then probably I also have these discussions with my team members

and the ECRs that do the hands-on work on the collaboration, to see.

I mean, I ask, and I'll probably make some suggestions for authorship, but I want

people to be happy with that and there's definitely open space for discussion.

And then as you indicated, sometimes the paper changes just as you are creating it

or in the revision and someone else puts in a lot more work.

So it has to be revisited, and I try to communicate that clearly from the beginning,

that it's dynamic, but it's important to have those conversations relatively early

and then we shape it and it really should reflect

the contribution that was actually made to the final project.

And I think in general, my approach is be generous with it.

So if someone is giving us, training us on something, doing something small for us,

I think all of those things should be rewarded with authorship if that's what they

want. So sometimes I'll ask people if they would like to be included as an author,

or sometimes if they're, for example, working for a facility or service, they might

prefer an acknowledgement or like

the grant funding acknowledgement and that's just what they do.

But depending on what they do, I do generally offer authorship as well.

It feels like not getting authorship is the one thing that can immediately get you a

bit of a bad reputation, isn't it? You know, I meet lots of researchers across the

day and if you say, what's going on, that'll be the one thing that's annoying them

at a particular time, is when they didn't get

some credit for something. And as you say, co-first authorship is a great way to

spread this around.

Yeah, absolutely.

I will say I think there is a balance. I'm also not a fan of gratuitous authorship

just 'cause someone attended one meeting at one point some early time in the

project and then hasn't contributed anything to the work or intellectually.

Yeah, there is a lot of that too. Thank you very much.

You know,

I'll just say one thing there though. I remember when I first started, I would make

my postdoc's cells for her, so their astrocytes, I would culture them from their

pups. And she put me second on a paper she wrote, and I was utterly amazed, no one

had ever done that before. And I said to her, but how come you've put me on here?

She went, look at those other names, they didn't do anything.

There you go. Sorry, that was my little anecdote there.

No, I think that's an important point, to give that credit.

When we did our big ECR dementia survey, we actually had a conversation and said,

right, who needs some papers? Who actually needs some senior authorship, who needs

some first authorship right now, to divide this up between us?

I mean they're only, you know, career papers. They're not scientific ones in the

same way, but

it's a conversation about who would benefit the most from this, because you're all

so senior now that of course you don't care any more about papers, do you?

The universities do, unfortunately.

I am, of course, teasing, as I write an article right now about promotions.

I'm

very aware of that. Thank you very much.

So we've talked about how good collaborations are built, but now let's talk about

how they fall apart, when people miss deadlines and somebody agrees to do everything

in a meeting and then delivers nothing afterwards.

Nathan, without naming any names, has this happened to you?

Is there a collaboration that became harder than you expected?

Were there warning signs early on? Is there anything you wish you'd done

differently?

I mean it's hard to say too much, isn't it, without being quite obvious who you're

talking about, I think. I've had a few difficulties, I would say, in terms of

collaborations, but they've been across a range of different things.

So I've had challenges when putting a bid in, chasing people who just haven't

contributed what they said they would do to the development, demanding more FTE,

you know, more time, more money, when you know they're not gonna actually commit

anything like what you're putting down. And then I've had challenges with PhD

supervision as well, where the other supervisor just doesn't provide or doesn't show

up and doesn't support in the way that they should.

And then I think a big challenge I've had is when you start also collaborating with

non-academics as well. So academics have issues between each other, obviously, with

disagreements about science and research, but it's also when you're working with

people from other organisations that have different priorities, different

approaches, and it's about understanding those different priorities, those different

approaches, and how you can come together on some shared kind of understanding.

And it's probably politically incorrect to say it, but I've had some quite

challenging PPI meetings and discussions where

it's been very challenging and junior researchers have been quite upset by the way

that they've been spoken to and haven't been supported.

And I think that's important, that when we set up groups like that and work

together, that we're really honest and say respect works both ways.

We all need to respect each other. And this is the behaviour that we expect from

each other and

this is what we won't accept, and this is our red line basically.

So I've had to handle quite a few in the last couple of years where that's happened,

and that's quite challenging, I think.

Yeah. It is particularly awkward when it's PPIE because of course they're not held

to the same... or are they? I mean, we should hold everybody to the same kind of

professional standard, and they're there to give their opinion, but equally, you

know, there's gotta be a sense of civility around that, hasn't there?

Definitely. And you know, we're all scientists, we all engage in open debate and are

happy to take critique and discuss, and people have different views, but it's about,

yeah, I think it's about delivery and how you behave.

And that I have had to confront, because I think there is a way, you know.

At the end of the day we all want to do good, we all want to support the cause, we

all want to support each other. And I think it's just about ensuring that everyone

understands that and remembers and respects that.

And I think that's important. I've dealt with that and then I've logged on to my

LinkedIn and been talked about, not named but talked about, by certain members of

the community. And I don't think that's appropriate.

Yep, I understand. Georgina, how about you? Same question really.

When collaborations start to break down, have you had that experience?

How have you dealt with it? Whether it's people not replying to things or things

going awry?

Yes. Well, I think it's not at all unusual, is it, for people to either not see eye

to eye or have quite different perspectives on a topic.

And I think that the greater the diversity of views and opinions, often the more

time you need to sort of spend trying to make sense of where people's different

perspectives are. And I recognise what Nathan's saying about there's times when

early career researchers

in some circumstances can feel really bullied, by either senior researchers or by

public contributors, when views are expressed very vehemently or when there feels to

be personal attack. So having enough people involved to be able to provide support

to all parties,

and also having some guidance and some trusted people within the system, ends up

being really, really important. So now research isn't just about sort of

understanding different disciplinary perspectives and finding a way to navigate

that. You also need to be working very much with

different individual personalities, which isn't always what researchers have as

their main skill, shall we say.

Sarah, Amanda, do you have a particular strategy that you employ when a collaborator

starts to miss their deadlines and not respond to emails?

Are you just very polite? Are you a polite prompter?

How do you do that, Sarah?

Mostly polite. I mean, maybe I'm slightly more direct in my German-ness.

And often when they're close collaborators, if it gets really desperate, I often

also have their phone numbers. So if they do not reply to three or four emails, they

might get a WhatsApp message as well. And

so it'll be polite, but eventually it'll be framed around, you know, what is the

problem and the solution. It's not like I'm an angry person who is trying to push

them for no reason, but it's often because there is a deadline that was externally

set, and so framing it more as a desperate in-need situation rather than angry

pushiness, I think.

Yeah. I agree. What about you, Amanda?

Normally people come to me because they need something, and so if they then don't

respond, send the samples or whatever, then when it's urgent I'll just ignore them.

So there you go.

Well, of course I'm making out here like you're the ones that people don't respond

to. Do you ever find yourself being the one who's getting those emails?

Sarah's nodding.

Yes, all the time. All the time. I'm terrible.

Like, I feel like, I don't know if this is true for everyone, but like there's too

much that I'm expected to do, more than I can actually do, by collaborators,

university administration, lots of administrative work, supervision work,

my team, others. And I've just come to accept that I can never do everything.

So some things do fall off the radar, and then I'll feel guilty.

I'm quite good when I'm prompted though, then I feel really guilty and then I

probably will get back then.

Okay, we're nearly out of time, so I want to finish with a quick collaboration

clinic. I'm gonna give each of you a situation, and I want you to tell me the first

thing you would do about this. And actually, Sarah, my first one that I

pre-prepared, you've already kind of just answered.

So, Sarah, I'm gonna come to you

first. The ideal methods collaborator was enthusiastic in the first meeting, but

they've now gone silent. And the grant deadline is three weeks away.

What's your first move? What are you gonna do?

Replace them? Give them a chance?

No, give them a chance, polite emails. I have replaced a collaborator about two

weeks before a grant before. But I would give them a chance, I would press them to

make a decision and also to say, you know, if it's not for you after all, that's

totally fine, but please let me know, so I can make a plan B very quickly.

But yeah, so I think it's incremental, right? You reach out politely and then it

gets more urgent, and if

maybe two weeks or a week before you still don't have anything, then I'd probably

send a friendly email and say, listen, grateful to have started this collaboration,

but I really need an input, so therefore I'm gonna approach someone else now.

Would you put a deadline on that? Would you say, if I haven't heard back from you by

this date... And then you're gonna stick

Yeah, I would. I would. Yes.

you're just gonna ghost them after that, right?

You're not gonna kind of say, hey, you didn't reply, you just never email them

again. They're dead to you now.

Yes, that's... I probably would, because at that point that's...

yeah.

Thank you, Sarah. Georgina, a community partner tells you that the research question

is wrong, but after the bid is like ninety-nine percent there, it's fully drafted,

it's ready to submit. What's your first move?

To try to understand why they think it's wrong, spend a bit of time trying to make

sense. At that stage, clearly it's unlikely to be a change.

Well, it isn't, but to make the effort to try to understand what the nature of the

concern is and to have some kind of plan for how those concerns will be taken into

account when it would be appropriate to do so.

So maybe for

a different bid, maybe later further down the line, depending on the nature of the

concern.

So is that you try to talk them into it, or you trying to say we'll address it, you

know, reassure them and we'll address

I mean you can't make a plan to decide how ultimately you're going to respond unless

you have an idea about what the nature of the concern is.

So my thing one is to understand why it is that they feel that it's wrong.

And it might be that the conversation then goes to sort of just explaining that at

this stage in the game it's not possible to change it, or it might be that their

concerns aren't really to do with the research question, but to do with some other

aspect of the

operationalisation of things, which might be changeable later, or it might be that

they've just got a different idea that you park and then see whether it's something

you want to pick up on in a different project another time.

So, you know, until I know what the nature of the concern is, I don't know what the

action plan's going to be.

Understand the problem, absolutely. And Nathan, a partner institution's costings and

support letter are missing forty-eight hours before submission.

What are you gonna do?

I mean, first of all, it's not uncommon. That's quite common.

I think give up on the emailing them and call them, if you've got a phone number for

them. I think call their research office or their finance office for the university

and try and get them to sort it out. But also speak to your own research and finance

office, because quite often they can speak to the universities on your behalf as

well and will do a lot better chasing than I would.

And then ultimately you give them a deadline and say, it's getting submitted at this

time with or without your costs.

And as soon as you tell people they might lose the money, they'll soon get back to

you.

Pick up the phone. Nobody does that anymore, do they?

It's amazing how many times you phone people now and it's like, what?

People have forgotten how to talk on the phone these days.

Close collaborators I've got on WhatsApp, so I'll just WhatsApp them.

And Amanda, samples arrive with incomplete information and the team expects results

in two weeks. What's your first move?

The move is we always tell people that they can have their results within two

months. So that wouldn't be an option. However, I mean, they'll get the results when

they've helped us to do what's right. So I would contact them and say, you need to

help us and then we can help you. So I think, yeah,

they expect the results, but they'll get them when we've got all the information we

need to do them, and I'd let them know that. So that's not a problem.

And then they're just gonna phone and influence you.

Lean on you as a friend. Amanda, Amanda, you can do this, right?

You can...

We can't, not without the right details, can't, no.

Good point. Okay, and a last question for everybody, and you'll all have had this,

and I have too. A paper has been stalled for six months, and probably because one of

you hasn't... no, not really... because one co-author won't approve the final draft.

What do you do, Sarah?

Well, I mean, it depends on how big the contribution of that co-author is.

I mean, everybody gets to see and comment on the final draft, but I always give a

deadline, and the understanding or the communication is that if you don't say

anything by that deadline, I will assume that you're happy with this final draft.

Yeah, that's my go-to move as well. What about you, Georgina?

I think, if at all possible, try to avoid getting into that situation in the first

place. So if you're doing papers within a sort of research programme or a network,

make sure that you've got a sort of research strategy, authorship and contribution

sort of agreement that's discussed at the beginning, and make clear who has the

say-so in

any particular paper, who makes the final call as to whether or not somebody's still

part of that paper, depending on the nature of their contribution, the timeliness of

their responses.

Warning signs are often there early on, aren't they?

It won't be the last draft that they haven't been quick to respond to.

What do you do, Amanda?

I mean, like Sarah was saying before, offer them a date and say, this is getting

submitted as is. We'll assume you're happy, and you need to tell us to remove your

authorship if you're not.

Do you have a different approach, Nathan?

No, I think same thing. Unless they have not contributed or been in correspondence

at all, then I think I would go with the latter of what Amanda said, that, you know,

if we don't hear off you, we'll remove you. But it depends.

It's not quite as simple as this way or this way.

I think it depends on what the paper is, how important it is, how much their

contribution has been, and when did they lose contact, really?

Yeah. It also takes a certain level of confidence to do that.

I feel like you're all very well established in your career, that you would feel

confident doing that. But I guess a PhD student on their second paper probably just

needs to go and have a chat with their supervisor.

Maybe that email isn't necessarily coming from

Yes. That's why I think

them.

the ultimate responsibility for the authorship and that management needs to rest

with the senior author.

Yeah. Senior authors should do their job, right?

Step in.

Yes.

Okay, before we finish, complete this sentence with one line or word.

A good collaborator is someone who

would be prepared to meet me face to face to talk through the project, because

that's the way that all the best things start.

Nathan, a good collaborator is someone who

is fun and reliable.

Georgina, a fun collaborator... No, a good collaborator is someone who

listens and respects others' perspectives.

Good. And Sarah, you can have the last word. A good collaborator is someone who

is trustworthy, fun, and is an equal contributor.

Thank you very much, Dr. Sarah Marzi, Professor Georgina Charlesworth, Professor

Nathan Davies, and Dr. Amanda Heslegrave for joining me and for giving us the

version of collaboration that does not usually fit on the grant summary.

What I take from this is that a good collaboration is not one where nothing ever

goes wrong. It's one where people can say awkward things early, they can make

decisions clearly, they can fix problems without playing games, and

make sure everybody gets credit properly. And what all of you have made clear from

this is that it's all about communication. It's all about putting things in writing,

having the conversation, trusting and finding people you can work with, and together

you can solve problems. And that who you choose to work with is just as important as

the impressive names on your application. You'll find links

to our guests and their projects, and further information and resources on building

research collaborations, in the show notes and on our website at

dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk. Do also visit us in the Dementia Researcher

community, where you can meet other researchers across disciplines and career stages

who are all, I'm sure, very interested in collaborating with you.

I'm Adam Smith, and you've been listening to the Dementia Researcher podcast.

Thank you very much.

Thanks.

Thank you.