Threads of Discovery – Seeking lived experience with Parkinson’s Disease

We will be hosting an in-person introductory meeting on Wednesday 22nd April for lived experience partners and researchers. Find out more below.

We are a research group from University College Dublin (UCD) studying new therapies for Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s causes symptoms like tremor, stiffness, slow movement, speech disturbances and sleep problems. We research Deep Brain Stimulation, a therapy that uses electrical signals to improve brain function, which we are expanding towards new target locations and new algorithms. Our work uses rat models, where we record brain activity during behaviour, monitor sleep, and study ultrasonic vocalizations to better understand how these therapies improve symptoms.

This communication is part of a project funded by UCD STEM Challenge Fund called  “Threads of Discovery: Weaving Patients into Biomedical Research” driven by the Patient Voice in Health Research network in UCD Conway Institute. As part of this initiative, we are looking for partners with a lived experience of different disease areas to collaborate with researchers within UCD Conway Institute.

We will be hosting an introductory meeting on Wednesday 22nd April for lived experience partners and researchers. This will be in person, and will be a day to get to know each other, to learn a bit about public and patient involvement (PPI), to set expectations, and to have a chat.

We hope through this initiative that long-term partnerships will be established. However, if at the end of the day you think this isn’t for you, that is absolutely fine. You won’t be locked into something you don’t want to be involved in! This is all exploratory.