Ready! Set! Brain! – Lightning talks and competitive presenting at The Great British Brain Off

The event took place on Thursday 13 November at Peckham Levels, and was part of the 2025 Being Human festival. The winning talk presentation was from PhD student Louise Moles. 

Below, Louise and some of her competitors share a little about their talk topics, and the experience of being part of the first Great British Brain Off!

Louise Moles: Patterns of the Brain: Predicting Mental Health Outcomes Through Artificial Intelligence

My PhD research looks at how we can use artificial intelligence to understand the underlying neuroanatomical mechanisms across mental health. I applied to the Great British Brain Off to challenge myself to explain my research in a more digestible way. In research, it’s so important to make sure our work can be translated to a wider audience, otherwise it defeats the purpose of why we study mental health in the first place. The competition gave me the chance to present my work, and my broader research questions, in an accessible way, which I think is particularly important when talking about AI.

I’ve never really applied to extra-curricular events or competitions before, as it always felt like it would just add to my “to-do” list. But this experience helped me understand the “big picture” of my research, and gave me more confidence talking about my field. As nerve-wracking as it was to stand in front of a crowd and talk about a project I’ve been working on for a year, it was an incredibly rewarding experience. It was also a great opportunity to meet with people from the Lived Experience panel, which added another lens to the research that you may not always get when you’re mostly looking at data. Overall, it was a great way to make science fun and a unique opportunity hear about the different types of research.

Natalie Tawney: The DETERMIND study: Finding a Fairer Path to Dementia Care

Since working in dementia research, I’ve become much more aware of the misconceptions associated with dementia. When I tell people that my job involves interviewing people with dementia in their homes, I am asked questions loaded with stigma and misunderstanding of the condition. I wanted to help tackle this by sharing information, and the Great British Brain Off was a great opportunity to do this. Working in dementia care research has changed my own views and understanding of dementia and I know it is possible to change others’ attitudes too. Furthermore, being able to explain research to the public is an essential skill and the Great British Brain off was such a fun way to practice this!

It was a fantastic opportunity to have tailored coaching with Sally Marlow ahead of the event. We were encouraged to interact with the audience, include humour and stories - something that’s rarely raised when presenting at other events like scientific conferences. I was so nervous before, but when I came to present it actually wasn’t as scary as I thought. There was a relaxed and supportive atmosphere and the interactive activity I included at the start of my presentation helped me get into the swing of it. I really enjoyed listening to the other talks too and learnt a lot about a wide variety of mental health research. I also loved the skit from the lived experience advisory board, it shared a clear and powerful message of what meaningful lived expert involvement is, and isn’t, and it was very entertaining!

The whole event definitely gave me food for thought of how I can improve my own research and better involve lived experts and the public. I would recommend this experience to anyone looking to hone their communication skills, confidence, and learn something new!

Dr Usman Ashraf: THROB-BEAT

It was an absolute pleasure to present our research project, THROB-BEAT as part of The Great British Brain Off 2025. THROB-BEAT is a project I have been working on alongside my co-investigator Dr Ahmed Abdalla and supervised by professor Peter Goadsby. Migraine is one of the most common neurological disorders as well as one of the most disabling, and whilst there are lots of different symptoms associated with migraine, throbbing head pain remains one of the most easily identifiable.

Although for many decades this throbbing has been thought to be caused by the pulsation of arteries in and around the head, there is surprisingly little evidence for this. In fact, there is some evidence that this might not be the case. Our research involves the use of a custom-built app that connects to a heart rate monitor strapped around the chest. The app measures heartbeat whilst the participant marks when they feel throbbing by pressing a button. The app saves the recording of this and not only produces data, but is coded to perform the statistical analysis itself to see if the throbbing is synchronised with heartbeat in some way.

We were incredibly excited to present THROB-BEAT for several reasons beyond our own enthusiasm for the project concept. We wanted to convey that there are researchers who care about migraine and want to help this underserved and often stigmatised population by using creativity and advances in technology to answer tricky questions in new ways. Artificial Intelligence is highly topical nowadays, and we anticipated that the audience would be interested to see a unique and ethical way this could be leveraged for patient-centred research. It is vital to be able to share these ideas with a patient population as well as researchers in fields outside of our own. Without this collaborative approach, it would be impossible to not only engage people in research that benefits them, but to design research in a way that we know would actually work for patients.

Although it can be daunting to present in front of a crowd, particularly when all you have up your sleeve is corny humour, I nevertheless enjoyed being able to engage such a lovely and supportive audience and most valuably, receiving feedback afterwards that patients with migraine felt they were heard and listened to. The Great British Brain Off is ultimately all about that, connecting researchers across fields and patients in a fun and dynamic way to strengthen our steps forward together. It therefore is an excellent opportunity for anyone inside the research field as well as lived experience or even just any interest in health and science to attend.

Zoë Firth: We Need to Talk about Expressed Emotion

I presented on the topic of expressed emotion – the emotion parents express when talking about their children – and what it has shown us about the relationship between parenting and children’s mental health. The Great British Brain-Off was a delightful evening – even though we’re technically neighbours working in the same building, there is so much fascinating research going on at the IoPPN that I know absolutely nothing about.

I’d encourage all researchers to take part in events like this; it is simultaneously a challenge and an invitation to justify the point of what we do, and why our research matters to the real world. Honestly, it reminded me of why I wanted to work in research in the first place. Many thanks to everyone who came out to watch us – as the last act of the evening, I’m just grateful that everyone stayed until the end!

Po-Chang Tseng: Autonomy and Decision-making: How do we know when a child becomes an adult, if not by age?

I presented on "Autonomy and Decision-making: How do we know when a child becomes an adult, if not by age?" It's a topic that touches everyone's life and can spark really interesting conversations, from everyday experiences to deeper philosophical questions. I wanted to take part in the Great British Brain Off because it seemed like a perfect chance to share what I've been researching with people outside academia and have genuine conversations that keep my work connected to real-life experiences.

The experience itself was challenging in a good way. Figuring out how to explain my research in plain language and keep it short wasn't easy, but the audience made it worthwhile. They were really enthusiastic and came back with brilliant questions and insights. I'd encourage anyone to attend or take part in events like this. Such events provide invaluable opportunities for researchers to communicate with diverse audiences and for people from all backgrounds to contribute their perspectives, ensuring that academic work remains connected to public experience and that diverse voices are heard.

Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh: Involvement for Dummies

Rachel, Raza and I presented a short skit, Involvement for Dummies, which was a humorous take on some of the challenges and barriers to lived experience involvement in mental health research and how to overcome them. We thought this was a fitting topic for an event like this because it highlighted for a public audience that good mental health research needs the voices with people of lived experience to shape all aspects of research design in order for that research to really make a meaningful difference in the lives of people who experience mental health struggles. We hope our skit showed this in a light-hearted yet poignant way!

Taking part in the Great British Brain Off was a wonderful experience from start to finish! We were supported throughout the process, including a really instructive coaching session with Sally Marlow, and the team were very flexible and accommodating about how we participated. The event itself was really dynamic and enjoyable; the audience was super engaged and the other presentations were really interesting. We would definitely recommend attending and participating in activities like this - for researchers it’s really energising to engage with non-academic audiences and get new perspectives on your work and for audiences it’s a cool way to learn about new research in a fun and accessible way.

Luce Stewart: BPD - On the Battlefield

My presentation discussed the impact of social and clinical stigma on those diagnosed with BPD (borderline personality disorder). 1 in 10 people with BPD die from suicide and 75% attempt it, and I believe stigma is contributing towards these high figures, as it blocks people from accessing support. At the Great British Brain Off, I used storytelling to detail the standard care pathway (specifically the lack thereof) of someone with BPD. The journey included missed referrals, clinicians assuming attention-seeking behaviours and the development of tenacity without support of treatment. My story was accompanied by illustrations, using a brave knight as a stand-in for someone with BPD, fighting stigma on a battlefield.

As someone previously diagnosed with BPD, who has also lost friends from suicide due to failure of services, I have been looking for the right opportunity to share my concerns about the amplitude of stigma. I decided they could only be shared in a space which was welcoming, supportive and celebratory of people with lived experience. The Great British Brain Off was perfect for all these reasons. The team immediately understood why the topic was so important to me. I could tell that the audience on the night had closely listened, taken something away from my talk and maybe changed their opinion in some cases. All these outcomes will help tackle stigma, so I’m incredibly grateful to the team for giving me the platform to do what’s most important to me.

Miriam Vignando: Visual Hallucinations as a Window on Parkinson’s disease Paths

For the GBBO my presentation revolved around visual hallucinations in Parkinson’s disease. My field of research is neurodegenerative disease, and I primarily use computational modelling and machine-learning based approaches developed to allow to identify individual-level variations against large datasets. Among the different neurodegenerative diseases I research, there is Parkinson’s disease, and I spent my first postdoc here at KCL working on a neuroimaging and a drug study on visual hallucinations in Parkinson’s. To this day, whenever I speak about my research with friends and family, I notice that not many know that Parkinson’s can cause visual hallucinations in almost half of the people with this diagnosis. The fact that this is still a lesser-known topic is one of the reasons why I wanted to take part, as I think it is very important to understand these symptoms better, as research has so far shown that they might be a predictor of future dementia development.

Taking part has been a lovely experience, especially because I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and I have taken the opportunity to develop animations and ad hoc visuals and artwork to try to bridge the objective, which is my research, with the subjective, which is lived in experiences of Parkinson’s with hallucinations, thanks to the discussions I have had over the years with participants in our study. I think this is a great opportunity to get people to know what researchers are doing and also for ourselves as scientists, to push our creativity to see and communicate our work under a different point of view.

The Great British Brain Off hopes to return in the future, with more opportunities for those involved in research to share their work and experience with the public, in a fun and absorbing environment. You can read more about the event itself here.