Research highlight

Professor Nathan Davies: My journey into dementia care research

Beginning a career in dementia research

As my PhD started nearing its end, I knew I wanted to stay in dementia research. I’d been doing a European Commission PhD – one of the Horizon Europe programmes – and I had a lot of ideas I wanted to pursue.

I saw that Alzheimer’s Society had some project grants and so, in 2014, I applied as co-investigator along with my supervisor, Steve Iliffe. It was the first grant I ever got, and it was going to help build upon my PhD work, something I was really passionate about.  

During my PhD, I’d interviewed quite a lot of family carers about end-of-life care. While there were some practical and clinical options out there, there didn't seem to be anything tangible, like a resource or an intervention for professionals to use.  

My grant would allow me to turn my expertise towards creating something that would help to support people at end of life.  

Improving end-of-life care

During the interviews people told me about difficulties healthcare practitioners had in making decisions around things such as managing wellbeing, behavioural changes or managing eating and drinking, which naturally slows down at end of life. All of this could be quite scary.

I developed practical resources to guide practitioners dealing with complex challenges in end-of-life care. This was around the time when the Liverpool Care Pathway was being phased out, which created a gap and a real need for support on how to deliver end of life care.

Dealing with the setbacks

After my Alzheimer’s Society grant, I got a grant from Marie Curie which allowed me to extend into more specialist areas of palliative care. I'd also applied for an Abbey Field grant but didn’t get that – it was my first rejection and it was a blow. 

There have been setbacks along the way. Doing a PhD felt so overwhelming and I reached a point where I just didn’t want to do it anymore, I was struggling and wanted to drop out.

Steve was amazing. He just said, “Well, that's fine. Let's just carry on because the data needs to be collected anyway so you may as well just do that and don’t worry about the PhD aspect”. I remember thinking, that’s really helpful but has he just tricked me: I’m still doing my PhD and pretending I’m not. He was incredibly supportive and understood what I was going through.

My second supervisor, Greta Rait, gave me a lot of pastoral support at that time as well. Both of them steered me through. This is the sort of supervisor I want to be for my students.

The Alzheimer’s Society Fellowship opens doors

I had secured an NIHR Launching Fellowship, and with the Alzheimer’s Society grant, this gave me the opportunity to start building a team for the first time. To further build on my work I applied for an Alzheimer's Society Postdoctoral Junior Fellowship focusing on end-of-life care guidance for family carers. I started collaborating with Liz Sampson, who had been my PhD examiner, and was someone that I'd really admired and wanted to work with.

The Alzheimer’s Society Fellowship launched my career - it opened a lot of doors. At this time, a permanent post was created at UCL specifically to support my work, made possible by securing the Alzheimer’s Society Fellowship and other grant income.

Despite now having a permanent post, that was quite tough for a few years, although I enjoyed what I was doing. Over this period, I got more grants, worked with different people, supervised PhD students and took on more leadership roles in teaching and research. Soon I was an associate professor. 

On top of my Alzheimer’s Society Fellowship, I applied for a PhD studentship. This got me another project with the Alzheimer's Society, on improving advanced care planning for people living with dementia in GP consultations. 

Not long after that, I won the Dementia Research Leaders award from Alzheimer’s Society.  

Integrated dementia care research  

I still had big ambitions.

Taking a lead on one of the Alzheimer’s Society Doctoral Training Centres appealed to me as a chance to do something a bit more substantial, really interesting and quite different - it wasn't your standard kind of programme. 

With Professor Claudia Cooper we are now co-leads for Alzheimer’s Society Doctoral Training Centre for Integrated Dementia Care (I-CARE). 

There's such unequal distribution of care and research is the way to ensure we minimise that. 

I’ve seen the impact that research can have on the lives of people living with dementia and I know it’s the best way to ensure people can get the support they need no matter where they are in their dementia trajectory or where they live.  

I’m incredibly proud to lead this DTC and excited to see where the future takes us and the students.