Researchers share their best practices and challenges, as well as the rewards of being a Principal Investigator in video recordings from the Researcher Realities launch event in May 2023. Dr Katie Atkins (Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader, Usher Institute, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh). Dr Katie Atkins works on Evolutionary Epidemiology to answer questions about how the evolution of pathogens affects control of infectious diseases. She is an infectious disease modeller with a particular interest in HIV, antimicrobial resistance and vaccines. Her work and research group are funded by the ERC and the Wellcome Trust. She splits her time between the University of Edinburgh – where she is a Reader in the Medical School - with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – where she is Associate Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling. Dr Carsten Hansen (Senior Lecturer, Centre for Inflammation Research, Institute for Regeneration and Repair, University of Edinburgh). Dr Carsten Hansen is a cell biologist with an interest in how cellular sensing is transduced from the plasmamembrane to the nucleus. He started his research career at MRC-LMB in Cambridge with Ben Nichols, followed by post-doctoral fellowships at Cambridge and, later, in San Diego to work with Professor Kun-Liang Guan. In 2015, he was recruited to the University of Edinburgh Centre for Inflammation Research on a Chancellor’s Fellowship to set up a new lab. He is pleased that his team is diverse, international and that all are great team citizens. Through their shared interest in discovery based interdisciplinary science, they seek to address fundamental biological question. They strive to be challenged and to make important discoveries, but also seek to have fun along the way. Dr Catherine Montgomery (Chancellor’s Fellow, Science, Technology & Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh). Dr Catherine Montgomery is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the Sociology of Biomedicine at the University of Edinburgh. She works at the intersection of Medical Sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), and her research focuses on the juncture between scientific knowledge production and clinical care. She has two decades experience of interdisciplinary health-related research. In 2023, she was awarded a €2 million ERC Consolidator grant for the project DARE, ‘Data and the Healthcare ‘Revolution’’, which explores the transformations taking place at the intersection of data practices, care and learning in informatics-informed healthcare. Dr Wataru Uegaki (UKRI Future Leaders Fellow & Lecturer in Semantics, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh). Dr Wataru Uegaki is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Lecturer in Semantics at University of Edinburgh in the Department of Linguistics and English Language within the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences. He obtained his PhD at MIT Linguistics in 2015 and was previously a JSPS postdoctoral fellow and an assistant professor at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (2016-2019). He serves as the (co-)PI of the following two collaborative research projects: (1) AHRC/DFG project: MECORE: A cross-linguistic investigation of meaning-driven combinatorial restrictions in clausal embedding (2021-2024); (2) UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship: Logic in Semantic Universals (2022-2025). Notes from the Principal Investigator, Q&A This article was published on 2023-11-08
