Another first for Researcher Revealed, this week’s episode I host a Women’s Health Research Midwife! Susara Blunden tells a tale of two halves: from gorgeous handbags working in Hedge funds in London to wearing scrubs and working on developing her career as a researcher. Her passion is inspiring, and I was loved hearing thie similarities and differences there were between a midwife’s and nurse’s career pathway as a researcher.

Top 3 Takeaways

1) Pathways into a research career are diverse

2) More support is needed for those in research delivery to advance their research career aspirations

3) Is research embedded in your clinical practice?

Bio: Susara Blunden is a Women's Health Research Midwife in the NHS and a master’s in research student at Bournemouth University on the NIHR funded INSIGHT programme. She currently investigating the secondary care endometriosis diagnostic pathways in the NHS and other high-income countries. After graduating with a BSc in Midwifery from Bournemouth University in 2014, she worked clinically for a few years before moving into NHS research delivery. She has extensive experience in research, from setting up research in clinical environments, recruiting participants, to collecting data for a wide range of studies and trials. She was key in delivering projects which explored topics such as obstetric anaesthesia, hypertensive disorders; pregnancy and non-pregnancy related, smoking cessation, preterm birth prevention, stillbirth and miscarriage reduction. She was a Principal Investigator on several of these projects. She is a member of the NIHR Reproductive Health and Childbirth National Research Champions Group helping to maintain and build research capacity regionally and nationally.

Find Susara online:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/susara-blunden-6a0a74138/

Susara’s Research:

Coming soon!

Susara is reading:

Whale Bone Theatre by Joanna Quinn

Resources:

1) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2) Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life, Patterns, Proteins and Peace: A Life in Science by Georgina Ferry

3) NIHR Principal Investigator training programs:

- Associate PI Scheme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at5PM61X0Yw

- PIPP: https://www.nihr.ac.uk/career-development/clinical-research-courses-and-support/principal-investigator-pipeline-programme

4) Being a PI as a nurse on medication trials (CTIMPS) https://youtu.be/JRZT_p3fHfk

Find Dr Rosalynn Austin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rosalynn-austin-147b3980/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosalynnaustin/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RosalynnAustin

Experience the adventures Dr Rosalynn Austin takes while travelling on @tea-riffictravels

The podcast content is the personal opinions and experiences of the researchers (Dr Rosalynn Austin and Susara Blunden) and not that of any of their affiliated institutions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Award winning heart failure advanced clinical practitioner Stephanie “Steph” Kirkland joins me to share her research journey. She tends to “fall” into things from nursing to research in her own words she accidently ended up a nurse who has award winning research. Listen for great tips and inspiration as to how you as a clinical practitioner can strengthen your research pillar.

Top 3 Takeaways

1) Take your clinical data one step further

2) Increase your clinical impact by sharing your practice

3) Balancing collecting the data you need for publication with the data that will serve your population is tricky

Bio: Stephanie Kirkland is an Advanced Clinical Practitioner in Heart Failure at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust. She has over 26 years of experience as a registered nurse, her career has spanned both acute and community settings, giving her a broad perspective on managing complex heart failure conditions.

Stephanie led the NHS England initiative Managing Heart Failure @Home, where she developed an innovative palliative heart failure care model integrating telehealth. The project achieved international recognition in May 2025, where she was awarded first place in the Nurse and Allied Healthcare Professional category at the Heart Failure Congress in Belgrade. She also presented her work at the British Cardiovascular Society 2025 conference, sharing insights into the symptom burden, quality of life, and healthcare utilization of 72 patients with advanced heart failure. She is deeply committed to advancing palliative and end-of-life care for people living with advanced heart failure. Her passion lies in improving access to high-quality, compassionate care for this vulnerable patient group.

Find Stephanie online:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-kirkland-43b6a037b/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/nhsuhcw/posts/?feedView=all

https://www.linkedin.com/company/coventry-university-research-innovation/posts/?feedView=all

Stephanie’s Research:

https://heart.bmj.com/content/111/Suppl_3/A107

https://esc365.escardio.org/presentation/299154

Stephanie is reading:

The Bible

The Greatest Story Ever Told by Bear Grylls

Find Dr Rosalynn Austin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rosalynn-austin-147b3980/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosalynnaustin/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RosalynnAustin

Experience the adventures Dr Rosalynn Austin takes while travelling on @tea-riffictravels

The podcast content is the personal opinions and experiences of the researchers (Dr Rosalynn Austin and Stephanie Kirkland) and not that of any of their affiliated institutions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Doing research is a specialist skill, especially in a clinical space. Robert Hull started his journey in research looking at microorganisms but saw an opportunity to use his research skills to enable others. He created Cadra Insights and now helps researchers on their journey from idea to testing that idea through research. From toxic waste to embedding impact into your research project, enabling the translation from research into reality.

Top 3 Takeaways

1) Being a researcher can be about helping other researchers

2) The research cycle is bigger than you might think

3) To have success in research ask the right people the right questions

Bio: Robert Hull is the founder of Cadra Insights, where he helps researchers, innovators and companies develop their health technologies into impactful solutions for healthcare systems. Originally a microbiologist researching slime (biofilms), Robert has spent over a decade working in MedTech, BioTech and Pharma across industry, academia and the NHS.

Robert understands what it takes to get new technologies adopted: the right evidence, at the right time, presented in the right way. Whether you're a startup or a seasoned pharma team, Robert’s experience and network help bridge the gap between a good idea and real-world impact. His work focuses on guiding innovators through the complexities of funding, evaluation, health economics and adoption by the NHS, making sure good ideas don’t just stay in the lab.

Find Robert online:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-hull-47993256/

Cadra Insights LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cadra-insights/

Read more about Cadra Insights:

Cadra Insights Web Page: https://www.cadrainsights.co.uk/

Robert is reading:

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

Amelia Fang (series) by Laura Ellen Anderson

Find Dr Rosalynn Austin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rosalynn-austin-147b3980/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosalynnaustin/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RosalynnAustin

Experience the adventures Dr Rosalynn Austin takes while travelling on @tea-riffictravels

The podcast content is the personal opinions and experiences of the researchers (Dr Rosalynn Austin and Robert Hull, PhD) and not that of any of their affiliated institutions.

Time Stamps

00:00:00 Titles

00:00:10 Episode Introduction

00:00:55 Introducing Robert Hull

00:03:54 My computer restarts

00:04:01 We are back

00:04:30 Researcher Revealed Rapid 11

00:13:52 Robert’s journey into research

00:18:18 From PhD to consultancy: how to improve the translation of research

00:22:49 The research cycle according to Robert

00:29:39 What is Carda Insights?

00:32:31 How Carda ensures Robert remains research active

00:45:35 How to find out who the right people are to ask them the right questions

00:59:24 Top 3 take aways

01:04:50 Video Links

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To kick off Season 3, we start with the first Welsh clinical scientist (echocardiographer) in cardiology to get a PhD, Dr Emma Rees PhD, FBSE. She is now expanding her expertise diving into the use of big data in research. We discuss her journey into research, how being visible expanded her research opportunities, and her thoughts on imposter syndrome. Listen for great tips on being a research leader from someone who knows what it is like to be the first!

Top 3 Takeaways

1) Take a team approach to make research better

2) Expand your expertise through your research

3) Be visible so you are they person approached for research opportunities

Bio: Emma is an experienced clinical academic who specialises in ultrasound heart scans. She is the scientific director of a novel out-of-hospital heart scan clinic which has the triple aim of providing a clinical service to NHS patients, supporting research on point-of-care scans for early diagnosis of heart failure, and enriching the university education of healthcare professionals. Emma is part of the leadership team of the Wales National Cardiovascular Research Network. She currently holds a personal research award from Health and Care Research Wales and an Application Development Award from the National Institute for Health and Care Research. Emma is an Associate Professor of Healthcare Science and co-lead Healthy Ageing and Chronic Conditions Research Institute at Swansea Bay University.

Find Emma online:

www.linkedin.com/in/emma-rees-b38566368

Read Emma’s Research:

1) Https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehae666.3516

2) Https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehae666.3515

3) https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehae666.3514

4) Https://doi.org/10.1530/ERP-19-0011

Read more of her research here --> https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5373-1005

Emma is reading:

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Find Dr Rosalynn Austin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rosalynn-austin-147b3980/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosalynnaustin/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RosalynnAustin

Experience the adventures Dr Rosalynn Austin takes while travelling on @tea-riffictravels

The podcast content is the personal opinions and experiences of the researchers (Dr Rosalynn Austin and Dr Emma Rees) and not that of any of their affiliated institutions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As you know I am on a journey to embed digital and computing sciences into my own research. As such I was very happy when I was approached to have Lars as a guest! He is a co-founder of Corti and from everything I could read, listen and watch about him, research is at the core of what he aims to create. We take a deep dive into the differences in research in computing and health sciences, how synthetic data may make health care more inclusive, and how digital health solutions should be evaluated.

Top 3 Takeaways

1) Anything I cannot create, I do not understand.

2) The only way to get better is to be deep in research

3) Evaluation is tricky – intersectoral collaboration will increase your evaluative ability.

Bio: Lars Maaløe is co-founder and CTO of Corti. He holds a MS and PhD in Machine Learning from the Technical University of Denmark. He was awarded PhD of the year by the department for Applied Mathematics and Computer Science and has published at top machine learning venues: ICML, NeurIPS etc. His primary research domain is in semi-supervised and unsupervised machine learning.

Find Lars online:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/larsmaaloe/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/corti/

Read Lars’s Research:

1) FactsR: A Safer Method for Producing High Quality Healthcare Documentation

2) An Unsupervised Approach to Achieve Supervised-Level Explainability in Healthcare Records

3) Normalized AOPC: Fixing Misleading Faithfulness Metrics for Feature Attribution Explainability

4) Do End-to-End Speech Recognition Models Care About Context

Lars is reading:

1) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

2) Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot

3) The Optimist: Sam Altman, Open AI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey

Resources mentioned:

Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/

Paper on the benefit to mixed model learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18593

Find Dr Rosalynn Austin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rosalynn-austin-147b3980/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosalynnaustin/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RosalynnAustin

Experience the adventures Dr Rosalynn Austin takes while travelling on @tea-riffictravels

The podcast content is the personal opinions and experiences of the researchers (Dr Rosalynn Austin and Lars Maaløe) and not that of any of their affiliated institutions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I meet Angela at the Heart Failure Association Conference in 2024 (https://youtu.be/P5wkXW_5I6A). I was impressed by her research and wanted to hear more about her journey into research. Listen to find out how Angela found her research soul and how an international collaboration started with a thumbs up on a Facebook post!

Top 3 Takeaways

1) Follow your passions and just jump!

2) Bring your whole self to your research.

3) Find your research soul.

Bio: Dr. Angela Durante is an Assistant Professor at the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Health Science at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa and a nurse researcher at Fondazione Monasterio. She earned her PhD from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in 2019. In 2020, Dr. Durante received the prestigious "CVSN Clinical Article of the Year Award" from the American Heart Association for her work on caregivers’ contributions to self-care in heart failure patients. As a Fulbright Scholar in 2022, she expanded her international research collaborations. She has authored numerous high-impact scientific publications, contributing to advancements in evidence-based nursing practice for cardiovascular care. Her work aims to bridge clinical practice and research, fostering innovative approaches to patient-centered care and healthcare policy.

Find Angela online:

X: @Angie_Durante89

Google scholar profile: https://scholar.google.it/citations?user=jE2aLP0AAAAJ&hl=it

Read Angela’s Research:

1) Durante et. al. 2019 https://journals.lww.com/jcnjournal/abstract/2019/03000/caregiver_contribution_to_self_care_in_patients.18.aspx

2) Younas et al. 2019 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jan.14264

3) Graven et. al. 2024 https://journals.lww.com/jcnjournal/abstract/2024/05000/self_care_problems_and_management_strategies.4.aspx

4) Buck et. al. 2024 https://journals.lww.com/jcnjournal/abstract/2024/05000/caregivers__contributions_to_heart_failure.10.aspx

Angela is reading: Il lupo di Skopje by Annick Emdin

Find Dr Rosalynn Austin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rosalynn-austin-147b3980/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosalynnaustin/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RosalynnAustin

Experience the adventures Dr Rosalynn Austin takes while travelling on @tea-riffictravels

The podcast content is the personal opinions and experiences of the researchers (Dr Rosalynn Austin and Dr Angela Durante) and not that of any of their affiliated institutions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I attended the Association of Cardiovascular Nursing and Allied Professionals (ACNAP) conference. The ACNAP conference has a very special vibe. Between presenting my post-doctoral research I managed to make the time to have four short conversations with a variety of people who were also presenting at #ACNAP2025.

Mairead Lehane is an Advanced Nurse Practitioner from Cork University Hospital Integrated Care presentd two posters. She shared how “UPBEAT” was developed for those with HFpEF (https://esc365.escardio.org/presentation/302090). Her reason for attending ACNAP: the additional perspectives gained from listening to other health professionals from around the world helps to inspire and refine your clinical practice.

Assistant Professor Angela Massouh from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Her ESC profile will take you to all her work presented at this conference (https://esc365.escardio.org/person/144105) In our conversation she focused on the work she is presenting on caregiver burnout (https://esc365.escardio.org/presentation/302035). Her reason for attending ACNAP: it is an opportunity to network and collaborate that grew her career.

Andreas Dirksen is an Advance Nurse Practitioner from the University Hospital in Frankfurt. He was presenting a clinical case from his own clinical practice focused on the subtle red flags of Amyloidosis (https://esc365.escardio.org/person/261708). His reason for attending ACNAP: Why not? Bring your clinical case as that will open the door to collaborations, networking and mentorship.

Professor Robyn Gallagher from the University of Sydney in Australia. Check out her ESC profile (https://esc365.escardio.org/person/8180). We spoke about her presentation cognitive dysfunction in women with cardiovascular conditions (https://esc365.escardio.org/presentation/292211). Her reason for being at ACNAP: it’s the place where clinicians and early career researchers are supported to share their research and evaluation work.

If you want to see more about what happened at this conference check out the #ACNAP2025 on Instagram, X, and LinkedIn.

The podcast content is the personal experiences of the host (Dr Rosalynn Austin) and guests (Mairead Lehane, Angela Massouh, Andreas Dirksen, and Robyn Gallagher) and not that of any of their affiliated institutions or the European Society of Cardiology.

Find Dr Rosalynn Austin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rosalynn-austin-147b3980/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosalynnaustin/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RosalynnAustin

Experience the adventures Dr Rosalynn Austin takes while travelling on @tea-riffictravels

Filming equipment:

DJI Osmo pocket 3

Xiaomi 12T Pro

ClipChamp Premium subscription

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.