
Beccy Owen - The Trials and Tribulations of Electrophysiology
From Dementia Researcher Blogs by Dementia Researcher
May 27, 2026 · 10 min · Episode 699
About this episode
Beccy Owen shares her experiences and insights on electrophysiology in Alzheimer's research.
Beccy Owen narrates her blog written for Dementia Researcher. Electrophysiology has taken up roughly 80% of Beccy's thoughts this past year, so she has written about it. Beccy is a PhD student at the University of Warwick studying how tau drives ion channel dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease, and she uses whole-cell patch-clamp and extracellular field recordings to do it. In this blog she walks through what these techniques actually involve. She writes about crying the first time she got a stable recording, dreaming about pipette tips, and the friend who genuinely wondered if she would have to change projects. The science is serious. The journey to being any good at it is, by Beccy's own account, fairly chaotic. https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/blog-the-trials-and-tribulations-of-electrophysiology/ -- Beccy Owen is a PhD Researcher at the University of Warwick, exploring how tau pathology disrupts neuronal ion channels and brain network activity in Alzheimer’s disease. As part of the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Programme, her work uses electrophysiology to better understand the molecular drivers of neurodegeneration. Originally from the Welsh countryside…
People in this episode
Guest: Beccy Owen
Topics covered
- electrophysiology
- Alzheimer's disease
- tau pathology
- ion channel dysfunction
- PhD journey
- neurodegeneration
Keywords
- electrophysiology
- Alzheimer's disease
- tau
- ion channels
- patch-clamp
- neurodegeneration
- PhD research
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of Warwick, Dementia Researcher
Books & works: The Trials and Tribulations of Electrophysiology
Places: Welsh countryside
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