Dr. Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics and Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, University of Oxford. Becky grew up just outside the northern city of Bradford. She did well at school, and was persuaded to study medicine. However, she realised after three amazing science-heavy years as an undergraduate at Oxford that this was a terrible choice for her, and quit clinical school very early on to study for a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. That was tough, but she made it through by the skin of her teeth, and went on to do her Post Docs and early faculty jobs in the USA, first at Yale, and then at Harvard / Massachusetts General Hospital. Then... she had a baby five months before COVID lockdown, and after a lot of time trying to balance a full time job with full-time childcare, both Becky and her husband were exhausted, so he took a job at Novo Nordisk in Oxford, and Becky desperately tried to scrabble to find a fellowship. Luckily ARUK liked her work and proposal, and here she is back in Oxford studying brain cells.