Hello all Neuromap Blog followers!
Apologies for the long silence. I have been overtaken by PhD busy-ness for the last few (8!) months and haven’t found time to update the blog. I hope to make up for this with some forthcoming posts about my progress.
As you will be aware from my last post, I was successful in securing an NIHR Imperial BRC PhD fellowship and enrolled as a PhD student at Imperial College officially in November last year. The focus of the last few months has been getting the various parts of my PhD project off the ground, and has been an exciting time! Now the dust has settled slightly, I can report back on the work I have been doing and some of the key events.
The main focus over the past few months has been twofold: firstly getting the mixed methods part of my study off the ground. This aims to investigate management of upper limb impairments in UK spinal injury centres (and other settings) and we have just received ethics approval to proceed with this from the HRA. Secondly, extending the scope of the previous experimental project, to allow for repeated measures of our participants. We have also recently received ethical approval for this amendment so we are now good to go!
Earlier this year, a survey I carried out during the pre-doctoral fellowship was published in ‘Topics in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation”; which you can read here: https://doi.org/10.46292/sci23-00069 .
Upcoming Posts
Over the coming weeks I will provide more information about the two strands of the project and the work done so far. This will include:
- A post about the published article mentioned above
- An introductions to the mixed methods study.
- More detail about my experience of running the experimental study with TMS and our next steps.
- The use of AI in research; I’ve recently been experimenting with AI transcription of interviews and have had some interesting results!
Watch this space.