Travel report from Imperial College London

Vilma is a doctoral student in the field of Neurodegeneration and Dementia in Miia Kivipelto’ s group at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society.

Why did I chose to visit the Imperial College London?

I chose to visit Imperial since part of my PI’s (Miia Kivipelto) research team is located there and therefore it was a natural destination. Already when we were planning the sub-studies for my PhD project, we were aiming to include a project that would allow me to travel for a short period of time abroad to visit another research team. We established collaboration with Dr Chinedu Udeh-Momoh and Professor Lefkos Middleton to analyse cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) proteins in one of their ongoing longitudinal observational study cohorts. 

CSF samples from the study cohort had previously been sent to Stockholm to be analysed at our collaborator’s lab at SciLifeLab. With the data, I travelled to London to combine it with the clinical data there. During the two weeks I stayed at Imperial, I learnt new methods to analyse data that I got to apply to our data set. The machine learning/statistical methods I applied were logistic regression, elastic net, and mixed model regression. 

What were the major differences between working in a lab KI and at Imperial College London? 

For me, the biggest difference was that I was working alone most of the time. Imperial has a strong hybrid work policy and since I was working on a desktop computer; I didn’t have the chance to move around as flexibly. This resulted in more limited interactions with other PhD students at the unit and didn’t get to interact with people, in general, as closely at Imperial. I also gave a seminar presentation for the research unit; however, no one came to listen to it on-site, people only attended online. I appreciate that in my division at KI there is usually high in-person attendance to different occasions and much more of a feel of belonging than what I experienced at Imperial.

Do you have any recommendations for doctoral students/researchers wanting to do a lab visit/research visit in the UK? 

If possible, I would find out beforehand how employees and students at the unit you wish to visit work: do they mainly work remotely or at the office? It impacts the experience a lot whether you get to interact with others during your stay or not. Also, there are several campuses and departments/units might be located in several of them. I recommend to take some time to consider (if needed/possible) in which campus to be located since it might impact the work environment and how much you get to interact with others. Also, as I got to see, some campuses in general are much nicer/fresher (e.g. White City Campus) than others (e.g. Charing Cross Campus).

What was your impression of London? 

I think London is a nice city (at least for the parts I saw). It was lovely to just walk around and appreciate the beautiful buildings. I went to see The Lion King musical – it was fantastic! 

What will you bring back to KI? 

For such a short stay, there was nothing that would have really affected me personally, but I bring back new skills in statistics/machine learning. Also, I have a new appreciation of the work environment I have at KI.