(Please forgive the abysmal punnage – I really struggled there!)<\/p>\n
When I arrived home from South Africa, I was determined to make some of the lessons stick. Some of them did; I kept on top of the staggeringly fast developments that are published in neuroimaging journals, as well as keeping in touch with friends who are working at the forefront of HIV-related cognitive deficits. Both of these are rewarding on a professional and personal level, and it\u2019s been nice to have such clear markers of the time I spent away.<\/p>\n
But, as you\u2019d expect, distractions at home beckoned. The hazy back-end of a glorious Cape Town summer was in stark contrast with\u00a0one of the coldest March\/Aprils<\/a>\u00a0on record in the UK, and I regularly arrived at Highfield completely drenched before starting work on the dratted thesis. I\u2019m sure everyone is well aware of the stereotypical caffeine-fuelled thesis-deadline-approaching doctoral student, and I (glumly) made no ground in disproving this.<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s done now, and I\u2019ve had the good fortune to be awarded an\u00a0MRC Centenary Award<\/a>\u00a0to further some of the cool stuff that I came across on the way. As well as writing publications to disseminate some of the findings from our lab, I\u2019ve been involved in some exciting new collaborations.<\/p>\n One of these (a real tongue-twister: \u201crespiratory psycho-neuro-immunology\u201d) is an exciting venture that will examine some of the\u00a0anxiety-reducing psychological interventions<\/a>\u00a0and how they could potentially help sufferers of\u00a0COPD<\/a>\u00a0and asthma. Notably, the time I spent in South Africa, meeting and discussing ideas with the other EUSARNAD trainees, has had a direct effect on how I feel during these preliminary discussions. Rather than being overwhelmed by the rapidfire slingshotting of (occasionally radical!) ideas from some of the\u00a0more senior group members<\/a>, I feel able to participate and contribute. It\u2019s a rewarding feeling!<\/p>\n But the most pressing collaboration, and the one that has currently got me writing this on a train to Gatwick at 5.35am, is with researchers at the\u00a0Leiden University Medical Centre<\/a>, in the Netherlands. At the end of April (actually, the day after the thesis was submitted, so I was feeling the requisite caffeine comedown)<\/p>\n Nienke Pannekoek<\/a>\u00a0(another EUSARNAD researcher, who I met at the\u00a0IADS 2013<\/a>\u00a0conference in Cape Town) came to Uni. Southampton to talk about her research at LUMC with Nic Van der Wee.<\/p>\n The idea of potential collaboration was something we had discussed since IADS, and I was given the chance to spend a few weeks in Leiden to see what research they were doing, and to talk about on-the-go projects in Southampton. While not strictly \u2018EUSARNAD business\u2019, I think it\u2019s worth mentioning as it really is a direct product of the work we did out in South Africa, and just goes to show how effective the Anxiety Disorders Network really is!<\/p>\n – Ben<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Please forgive the abysmal punnage – I really struggled there!) When I arrived home from South Africa, I was determined to make some of the lessons stick. Some of them did; I kept on top of the staggeringly fast developments … Continue reading