The global impact of UK researchers

Since wining an Early Career Researcher award in 2015, Dr. Sagar Jilka's career has taken him from football data science to mental health research.

Currently he's a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry & Neuroscience at King's College London (KCL),

Sagar and his team work on a range of research projects simultaneously, with the current lineup including a timely paper on the impact of social media on mental health. "The research projects that we work on evolve in response to what patients tell us is important," Sagar said:

Sometimes mental health patients don't like scrolling through social media because while they might be there looking for support, searching certain terms such as 'psychosis' or 'schizophrenia' can dig up hate-filled search results. Obviously, this is not ideal for somebody experiencing these symptoms.

This particular project is based on developing a machine learning algorithm to automatically identify stigma on social media. Another project is aimed at understanding what patients think about Ketamine as a form of depression treatment. Widely known as a horse tranquillizer or an illegal party drug, Ketamine is being repurposed as a potential antidepressant, so it's essential to understand what patients think about this and the best way to go about any future rollout.

Following his time at Imperial College London, where he won the Scopus Young Researcher UK Award in the Arts & Humanities category in 2015, Sagar took a slightly unusual route to his current role, with a stint at a London tech startup as a football data scientist. Working for a company that traded on football matches, Sagar would use machine learning to predict the outcome of football matches as accurately as possible, enabling clients to place bets on the results. As an avid Arsenal fan, Sagar was well suited to the subject matter but found the fast-paced culture and 7-day work week to be a challenge. "But I have no regrets," he said. "I'm really glad I tried it and I learned a lot."

Sagar credits the Scopus award with giving him the reassurance that he was on the right path and the confidence to apply for the data scientist job as well as his current KCL role:

It was a really big boost. I think having that on my CV really helped. The fact that it's a peer-reviewed award, and that I was nominated and won it based on my achievements, was very reassuring. And I think it gave me a lot of confidence because prior to that, I felt a little bit of imposter syndrome.

After completing her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, Charlotte Wray moved to Oxford, where she has worked for just over three years. In her current role, she heads up the COHORTS (Consortium On Health Outcomes Research in Transitioning Societies) collaboration.

This large-scale birth cohort study focuses on low- and middle-income countries, namely Guatemala, South Africa, the Philippines and Brazil. The idea is to investigate the relationships between childhood development – including nutrition, cognition, social and emotional development, and socioeconomic status – in relation to adult outcomes. Charlotte explains:

These cohorts have been followed since they were born, and they've been visited many, many times throughout their lives. We've now done a new round of data collection during adulthood, including a round of cognitive assessments. A key focus of this grant is cognition and mental health in adulthood.

The study is one of the largest and longest running birth cohort projects in the world. Some parts of the expansive project have now been running for more than five decades, with the oldest participant in Guatemala now in their 50s.

It's quite an impressive project – we're pulling together all of the data that's previously been collected throughout their lives so that we can track how early life experiences impact adult outcomes such as mental health and adult cognition. And then we can also look at what other factors might influence those trajectories, such as schooling or childhood cognition.

The vast amount of data collected enables the team to pinpoint why someone who has had a lot of adversity in their early life may thrive in adulthood, while for others that adversity continues throughout their lives. The goal of the research is to identify the factors that influence these life trajectories so that evidence-based recommendations can be made to shape future policy.

Unsurprisingly, this gigantic project is much bigger and broader than Charlotte's PhD research at Royal Holloway, which focused on atypical child development, such as the risk of language disorder at school entry. It was this work that won Charlotte the Scopus Early Career Researcher UK Award in the Arts & Humanities category in 2018. The win came as a surprise to her, but Charlotte considers it a great honor to be recognized for the work she was doing. Still a regular user of Scopus, she said:

There was a big initial buzz online — I got more Twitter followers, and there were definitely more people interested in my papers and talking to me about my research. And I think that having it on my CV is definitely something that will interest new employers.

As a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the University of Oxford Department of Chemistry, Dr. Michael J. Booth experiences first-hand the power of collaboration. His work is based on the generation of externally-controllable nucleic acids (EC-NAs) under the control of various stimuli.

“We use some of the body’s own molecules as ways of studying the body or treating disease,” he explained. “As most people will know, DNA and RNA are molecules within a cell that encode for everything that the body is made up of.”

Michael’s research group is looking at how to modify synthetically-made RNA and DNA, then use it to control how cells work. The resulting information could be used to study and treat diseases.

We are always thinking about how to control the activity of DNA and RNA,” Michael explained. “Obviously small molecules drugs are very useful, but DNA and RNA molecules can bring about more precise effects. Although, for any therapy there can be a lot of off-target effects around the body, for instance; so you might want to target activity to specific areas. We try and use chemistry to control the activity.

His team is interdisciplinary, which is how he worked throughout his PhD and postdoc. For Michael, bringing in voices from other disciplines is key to broadening understanding and impact:

I’ve always been aware of people from all different disciplines; people speak different languages in their own field. It’s about being exposed to that so you can bridge the divide.

The most interesting point is where disciplines are mixed together and where you can then create new ideas. For us, it is using the expertise of chemistry with biological molecules to then impact biology.

Michael also emphasized the need to actively include people, rather than hoping they will speak up:

If you’re from a different background, or anything like that, you need more people to have the option of speaking, not just hoping they speak. You need to make it happen.

In 2015, while working on his PhD at the University of Cambridge, Michael won Elsevier’s Scopus Young Researcher UK Award in the Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology category. He credits the win as a major stepping stone in his career:

That was really important for helping with future fellowships. These awards show recognition and open up opportunities in the future. I won the Scopus award while I was in my Junior Research Fellowship, and now I’ve got a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. It’s quite a prestigious fellowship, which no doubt the Scopus award helped me get.