In this episode of Enterprise Sessions from the University of Bristol, Professor Michele Barbour speaks with Dr Myles‑Jay Linton, Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, whose career has woven economics, health research, digital innovation and co‑production into a distinctive, socially impactful research portfolio.
Myles‑Jay reflects on his journey from an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Exeter to applied healthcare work in Bristol Medical School, a prestigious Vice‑Chancellor’s Fellowship, and now pioneering work on the intersection of youth mental health and digital life. Along the way, he has collaborated with clinicians, policymakers, university leaders, young people, and—unusually for his field—a commercial mental health app developer.
From shaping national guidance on information‑sharing in student mental health crises, to co‑creating digital toolkits with practitioners, to supporting developers integrating AI into peer‑support platforms, this episode explores how enterprise and social impact can coexist powerfully in research that is compassionate, rigorous, and deeply collaborative.
🔍 In the episode:
- Moving from economics into applied health research
- The value of not specialising too early
- Working with patients, clinicians and the public on locally‑rooted healthcare projects
- Measuring student mental health: tools, policies and global collaboration
- Co‑production as a core research practice—why it matters
- Informing national policy on emergency contacts and circles of support
- Collaborating with a commercial mental health app (Tell Me) to support young adults
- Ethical, practical and emotional considerations for researchers working in sensitive areas
- Digital Dialogues: improving practitioner conversations about online life and wellbeing
- Scaling training for mental health professionals—and the policy questions that follow
- The future of digital mental health and Myles‑Jay’s emerging entrepreneurial mindset
🌐 About the Enterprise Sessions
The Enterprise Sessions bring together a diverse mix of company founders and researchers who talk openly about their personal experiences of forming spinouts and start-ups, raising capital, academic-industry partnerships and the joys of translating research discoveries into real-world impact. The series aims to inform, inspire and challenge myths and stereotypes about research commercialisation and how businesses and universities can work together to tackle society’s biggest challenges.
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Connect with our Guests:
Prof. Michele Barbour – LinkedIn
Dr. Myles-Jay Linton – LinkedIn
Chapters:
- 00:00 – Introductions: From economics PhD to Bristol
- 01:16 – Balancing a new job with finishing a Ph
- 02:07 – Applied healthcare research and why it appealed
- 03:23 – Choosing breadth over narrow specialism
- 04:43 – Early projects: back pain, NHS business cases, money & mental health
- 06:31 – Interdisciplinarity and asking the “simple” questions
- 08:02 – Patient and public involvement as essential practice
- 09:15 – Co‑producing guidance for mental health practitioners
- 11:03 – The Vice‑Chancellor’s Fellowship: goals and unexpected pivots
- 13:11 – Measuring student mental health: tools, challenges and comparability
- 15:23 – National collaboration through the SMARTEN network
- 17:07 – A global impact: 20,000+ students across multiple countries
- 18:52 – Policy work: emergency contacts and widening circles of support
- 21:00 – The emotional demands of researching mental health crises
- 23:07 – Support networks, supervision and researcher wellbeing
- 26:07 – Moving to the School of Education and a digital focus
- 26:17 – Working with Tell Me: young people, apps and AI‑supported wellbeing
- 28:47 – What AI should (and shouldn’t) replace in mental health support
- 30:01 – Academic–industry collaboration for social good
- 33:07 – Digital mental health as a space for future enterprise
- 36:04 – Research England funding and improving online‑mental‑health conversations
- 37:57 – Digital Dialogues: co‑produced resources and huge practitioner demand
- 40:36 – Scaling training and big policy questions ahead
- 41:49 – The power of co‑production and rethinking expertise
- 44:03 – Reaching poorly served groups and going to community spaces
- 46:01 – Looking back: what young Myles‑Jay would think today
Transcript:
00:00:08 Prof Michele Barbour
Welcome to another enterprise session from the University of Bristol. My name is Professor Michele Barbour and today I am very fortunate to be speaking to Dr Myles-Jay Linton, who is a senior lecturer in our School of Education. Myles-Jay, first of all, thank you very much indeed for spending the time with me today. I’m really grateful.
00:00:24 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Thank you for having me. I’m very happy to be here.
00:00:26 Prof Michele Barbour
Wonderful. Great start. OK, so Myles-Jay, you’ve been at.
00:00:29 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m at the University of Bristol for a little while now, and I would like to explore your journey because you’ve done lots of different things in lots of different parts of the university. But perhaps we can start by looking a little bit earlier in your career. So perhaps you could tell me a little bit about, well, what were you doing before you came to the university?
00:00:44 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, right before I came to the university in 2017, I was trying my best to finish my PhD. I was in the economics department at the University of Exeter.
00:00:55 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
within the medical school, trying to marry up these ideas of economics and medicine, what it means to have quality of life and wellbeing and what it means to measure those things. And there was a really relevant role that came up at Bristol, which would have men leaving before finishing the writing up process of my PhD. It just seemed like it made sense. And luckily, it was the start of a really nice journey at Bristol.
00:01:16 Prof Michele Barbour
And yet, and I do know a couple of people that have done that, taking a job while trying to write up. I’m going to say, was that challenging? That must have been challenging.
00:01:24 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
It was a particular part of Bristol Medical School that was very focused on applied healthcare research, local challenges, what local healthcare needs are and how can we kind of activate that academic insight within the university to apply directly to those challenges. So a lot of the project ideas for the centre called Clark West, now called ArtQuest, were very responsive to identified needs. It meant you could be very close to the kind of clinicians working in the area, very close to
00:01:52 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
patients and the public who had a lived experience of the area. And I think after the PhD I was very keen to get as close to the applied end of things as possible and it just gave me the opportunity to be very, very hands-on whilst working on multiple projects. I think I was very much kind of tunnel vision as you are with a PhD and I was ready to give myself a bit more variety and the job absolutely gave me variety.
00:02:16 Prof Michele Barbour
And that strikes me, I mean, your field of mine is quite different, but it strikes me as quite an unusual opportunity straight out of a PhD. A lot of people would still go into quite a narrow focus specific project, maybe as a postdoc or even an industry, whereas you’ve gone straight into something which gives you breadth, which gives you variety. Was that always what you wanted to do? Is that something that specifically appealed to you?
00:02:39 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
In as much as I really sometimes struggle to be.
00:02:44 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
too narrow for better or worse. I think that I am probably someone who really enjoys variety. So even if I found one single thing that I was really activated and energized by, my brain would find other things that were either complementary to that or so dissimilar that it gave me a kind of a refreshing alternative. So yeah, having a postdoc role that kind of expanded things rather than close things down. I think I also potentially worried that
00:03:14 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
If I became too specialised in one thing, I might be limiting options for the future. And whilst I was interested in other things, it never really felt like a detriment to, in some ways, stay a little bit general. I do think that probably has helped me over the years.
00:03:32 Prof Michele Barbour
I absolutely recognise that, but it’s been my observation, having spoken to lots of people over the years, that a lot of people come to that realisation significantly later. A lot of people do specialise and specialise and specialise and only then realise they may have, I don’t want to say backed themselves into a corner because those specialist skills are really important, but limited options I think is how you said it, which is a more positive way of putting it. So are there examples of the sorts of projects you got involved in that role with Joe Coast that you could
00:03:57 Prof Michele Barbour
sort of illustrate that with a little bit.
00:03:59 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, I mean, my PhD was economics, so I think, an understanding of choice and decision making. I probably was thinking about options before I even start my postdoctoral journey. But yeah, some of the projects that I worked on in that first role, there was a project looking at
00:04:16 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
developing a peer support programme for people in and around Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire who were experiencing chronic back pain problems, trying to understand what would make peer support a really valuable form of support for these people. And another project was looking at how business cases are used in the NHS, in particular thinking about how people put together business cases and rationale for spending money because often people were almost reinventing the wheel. A big part of that project was looking at what makes
00:04:46 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
is a good business case in an NHS context. And then another project was looking at, in particular, mental health support for people who had experienced money troubles. Thinking about developing an intervention, specifically looking at what people needed in terms of psychosocial support, but also financial support. Often people needed support that was about both how they were feeling and also just really practical things about their finances. So that
00:05:11 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
pilot project was looking at how valuable would that support be? And I guess as an economist in that role, what would it cost to develop it and what cost savings could it create for the wider health sector?
00:05:28 Prof Michele Barbour
I mean, you said it gave you varied opportunities, but I mean, that’s hugely varied. They’re really, really different. Even those 3 projects you’ve mentioned are very, very different.
00:05:35 Prof Michele Barbour
not just in what they’re trying to achieve, but who I imagine you must have had to work with, the different disciplines you brought in. So how was that experience for you as an economist coming into this environment?
00:05:47 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I would say the economics department that I was working in was already very varied. So there we were all under the umbrella of economics.
00:05:57 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
There were qualitative researchers, there were quantitative researchers, there were modellers. We all had different methods that we were using. So already like locally, there were real differences in how we understood the topic. And I would say within these projects for my postdoc role, I think I was just okay with asking like quote unquote silly questions. I quite like it when an explanation is quite, at least to begin with.
00:06:20 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
clear and simple. And then working up into the complexity from there. So I was potentially sometimes the person in the room asking maybe the unsaid question that other people maybe also would have appreciated the answer to. And I think I never really, for the most part, got any negative responses to those questions that maybe I was feeling a little bit embarrassed about asking. But
00:06:42 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
It’s similarly something I advocate for now in my role and encourage other people to, particularly if I’ve brought assumptions into a conversation, if anything just hasn’t connected or clicked, I’m really always happy to clarify.
00:06:53 Prof Michele Barbour
I think it’s something you can never sort of learn too many times, isn’t it? It’s something I say to everyone from my undergraduates, postgraduates up is that sort of, if you’ve got a question in your head, if I said something,
00:07:03 Prof Michele Barbour
that you haven’t understood and you need clarification, chances are there’s plenty of other people in the room that are feeling the same. So be brave and say it. And I think it’s as true in a research context as it is when you’re teaching a room full of first year undergrads, isn’t it? That’s sort of, it’s not you, it’s me. If you understand what I’m saying, then ask me.
00:07:18 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
For sure. All of these projects that were being run by the centre had a really, really strong public and patient angle to them. So from idea inception all the way through to dissemination and impact.
00:07:32 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
there was a real agenda of what does this mean and how do we ensure that all of the stakeholders involved have an entry point into it, which meant clarity was a really prioritised value within all of those projects.
00:07:45 Prof Michele Barbour
I mean, I’ve observed the embracing of patient and public involvement and engagement in research. I suppose in my 20 years in research, it’s gone from almost nothing, 20 years ago in certain fields at least, to really, really sophisticated approaches
00:08:02 Prof Michele Barbour
that I’ve seen more recently. So how have you seen that? What difference does it make when there are members of the public or members of the group affected by whatever it is you’re trying to achieve, really in the room talking about it?
00:08:15 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
feels essential. One of the projects I’m working on at the moment that I co-PI with a colleague, Lucy Biddle, is about developing guidance for mental health practitioners, improving their conversations they can have with young people where their mental health and their online activity overlap.
00:08:31 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And a version of the project could maybe look like us developing that guidance as academics and disseminating that. Instead, what we’ve done is we have involved a group of practitioners, clinicians, nurses, mental health workers, really early on in the project. We have worked with them in workshops. We have spoken about what co-production means, how that might be different to co-creation. And really, if we want to create something collectively that will meet their needs,
00:09:01 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
having their needs built in and their voices built in at a really early stage just gives us more confidence that we are going to be pitching something that’s closer to what’s needed.
00:09:10 Prof Michele Barbour
And ultimately, most researchers want to see the impact of their research. This strikes me as a way of not ensuring, but making it much more likely your research is going to have the impact that you want it to.
00:09:20 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
For sure. I think it’s better work ultimately as well. I think that the training we’ve been able to develop and deliver with people who actually are having these conversations with young people on a daily basis, we have just created such a more sensible set of guidelines and training resources of much more rich and much more in-depth. And I think it’s made the evaluation of it so much more beneficial on the whole.
00:09:47 Prof Michele Barbour
Wonderful. So that’s what brought you to Bristol on an extraordinary array of projects under the umbrella of our medical school. But then you landed an extremely competitive opportunity, which was our Vice Chancellor’s Fellowship scheme. I know those were vastly oversubscribed and they were across all disciplines of research. So you were competing against physicists, geographers, mathematicians, medics, whatever. So you clearly achieved a great deal to get that fellowship. What did you set out to do?
00:10:16 Prof Michele Barbour
and what actually happened in real life.
00:10:20 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
The main thing I set out to do was really get to grips with the topic of what was going on at the time for student mental health. So some of the big questions I had were, how do we measure student mental health outcomes well? What does that look like? Both at a local level for the University of Bristol, but also how do we share that insight and knowledge with our peers across the sector?
00:10:44 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I was also really interested in mental health policy. So in particular, what happens when a university, in this case, the University of Bristol, wants to share information with somebody outside of the university about how a student is doing? What are some of those real pinch points and key moments where actually it might be useful to involve somebody
00:11:06 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
in the support of a student as part of a broader circle of care? How do we do that in a way that’s practical, in a way that’s legal, in a way that’s ethical, in a way that’s beneficial? So I had these two angles of measurement, kind of understanding the patterns of mental health, but also what do we actually need to do? What kind of policies and practices do we need to have in place? Some of the work, I would say, given the onset of the pandemic, didn’t materialise.
00:11:34 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
exactly as I had planned it. Actually, just it created opportunities to do a little bit of work to understand what was happening for students at that time, of upheaval, and also what other collaborative links could I develop in and outside of the medical school and the School of Education that again were a little bit more responsive to the things that were happening right now.
00:11:57 Prof Michele Barbour
Is the sort of picture that has revealed? I mean, first of all, your aspiration to
00:12:03 Prof Michele Barbour
have meaningful metrics of student mental health. To be honest, I find it quite hard to imagine where what even begins with that, because this is not, it’s not easily numericalised data, is it? So to the extent that it can be simplified in a way that’s suitable for a sort of general interest podcast like this, what kind of methods did you find seem to be emerging as the ones you thought were most tractable or most appropriate?
00:12:27 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
A big part of this was actually just looking at what does
00:12:31 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
clinical measurement look like outside of universities? How are people in, for example, healthcare, measuring and understanding where somebody’s health is at? And a big part of it was looking at the most validated, the most confident tools that we had for measuring things like anxiety and depression. As you can imagine, there are loads. A big issue we were having at the time was
00:12:53 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
You had one university measuring their students’ outcomes with one tool, another university measuring their outcomes with another tool, and it just meant we couldn’t compare meaningfully. So the numbers we were getting, even though they were trustworthy numbers, they were measured in different ways.
00:13:08 Prof Michele Barbour
Measuring different things.
00:13:09 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah. A big part of the work was actually joining up with other universities to develop some best practice around which tools are at least going to give us the most valid measures. And also at Bristol, measuring with the same tools
00:13:22 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
over several years, so that actually we could look at what differences were happening between 2017, 18, 19, 20, further after that as well. And within that work, we do and did see rises in levels of anxiety and depression. And that was a picture that was also seen in other universities.
00:13:42 Prof Michele Barbour
So even with different measurement tools, we’re still seeing that rise.
00:13:46 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
but I would say over the years, and although there is not full consensus, I mean there isn’t even full consensus over what mental health means or well-being, but gradually people were getting on board with the idea of using a smaller set of tools that were being used in other studies, which meant that
00:14:03 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
You could compare what you find at University X to a bigger study, particularly given that the numbers that were being collected in some of the surveys weren’t always very high. At the very least, you were able to compare what you got in 2020 with maybe what another similar university got in a similar year.
00:14:19 Prof Michele Barbour
You mentioned, Myles-Jay, that while you’re doing this at the University of Bristol, it’s really important to you to collaborate with other universities, first of all, to understand how they were measuring student mental health, but then to try and sort of move towards a place where we’re measuring things in more similar and comparable ways. So to what extent has that been successful? Did you find other universities sort of willing and interested in that collaboration?
00:14:40 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, absolutely. There is a particular network called SMARTEN.
00:15:28 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
that is headed up by colleagues at King’s College in London. Those colleagues, along with colleagues at countless other universities actually, have done some work to look at and map what are the various different measures that are available, what are the kind of the evidence base of how valid they are, and what if we are going to, for example, measure things like loneliness, what are the tools there? If we’re going to measure things like wellbeing, what are the tools there? Similarly for anxiety and depression, because
00:15:57 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Often universities want to measure more than one thing. There are more than one outcome that will be relevant to a university thinking about developing an intervention or thinking about identifying which groups might be most at risk. And a big part of that collaboration was looking at the broader landscape, not just one measure of mental health, but what are the various things that may be useful. And again, universities may choose to measure different things, but I suppose it’s just
00:16:23 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
as often as possible, making sure those tools that are being used are not just being created based on what’s kind of been decided on the day, but are actually using, where possible, validated, freely available tools that are clinically meaningful.
00:16:38 Prof Michele Barbour
there’s a cohort of universities that are working on this and sort of agreeing on it, but there’s myriad, particularly the smaller universities in the UK, who often don’t have the, either the person power or the research sort of capacity to do these things themselves, but can they now access guidelines so they don’t have to invent their own way of doing this, they can access sort of best practice.
00:16:58 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, so we as a group published a policy paper that maps out a lot of these options and also maps out our rationale for organising it in the way that we have.
00:17:07 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And another thing that happened as an offshoot of our work at Bristol, we ran several surveys. We joined a international collaborative network called the Worldwide University Networks Student Mental Health Working Group that had universities from across that network. I now co-chair that group. And the University of Bristol survey that we ran for several years then went on to inform the development of a survey that’s now being used internationally.
00:17:34 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s fantastic. I was wondering if this had had
00:17:37 Prof Michele Barbour
impact beyond the UK and very clearly it’s having a great deal of impact.
00:17:40 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, so as of the last point I checked in, we’d collected data on over 20,000 students who are studying in universities in South Africa, in Taiwan, in Mexico, in Brazil.
00:17:55 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And there are plans to extend that work even further.
00:17:57 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s incredible. How satisfying and exciting that must be for you, I would imagine.
00:18:02 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, it really is. And it also just ensures that the work that we’re doing has an extended life, that we aren’t just in our kind of tunnel vision way of thinking, doing the best we can locally without actually sharing that with our colleagues who, for many reasons,
00:18:17 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
may have had other strategic priorities or are simply arriving to the topic of how we measure student mental health at a different time. And they’re able to then now look at insight we’ve generated, utilize our tool, and again, collect data that they can be confident in.
00:18:30 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, enormously powerful, enormously powerful.
00:18:41 Prof Michele Barbour
And then the other aspect of that project you talked about was policy and influencing policies that make meaningful differences. So maybe you could expand on that a little bit. What were some of those outcomes?
00:18:52 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So a big part of that focus of the work was looking at…
00:18:55 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
how universities go about engaging emergency contacts of students when there are concerns about mental health difficulties. So particularly thinking about whether there are key moments where actually extending that circle of support, that support network, that net of support would be beneficial to help with the situation. And at Bristol, we introduced a policy called opt-in where on registration, every student was invited to provide a contact and stay
00:19:26 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
in advance whether or not they were okay with the university using that contact detail if there were concerns about their mental health. At the time, not many universities were doing that. Now more are, but it was a really landmark policy intervention that was really there to attempt to, in key moments, widen that circle of support to help with the ongoing support of the student. And the work that was carried out at Bristol as part of my fellowship involved
00:19:54 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
trying to understand from a student perspective when it would be okay and when it would be more of a disadvantage. And that work really tried to get kind of under the bonnet and understand that, well, there are moments where it actually would be quite challenging for a student to be the one to phone home and say, I’m struggling, I need a bit of extra help. And on the flip side, there might be times where, you know, involving, for example, an aunt or a parent or an older sibling,
00:20:22 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
could have the potential of making a situation worse, or it could just be that person isn’t the right person to call in a crisis.
00:20:29 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So that work was really trying to understand the nuances of when it would be potentially useful and when it would be more of a disadvantage.
00:20:36 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And that research, done at Bristol as part of my fellowship, went on to inform University UK’s
00:20:44 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
national guidance on information sharing.
00:20:47 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We also wrote up an outline of our policy so that other universities across the UK and further actually are able to see what we are doing at Bristol.
00:20:55 Prof Michele Barbour
Is it possible, I don’t even know how this would work, but is it possible to observe outcomes of that?
00:21:02 Prof Michele Barbour
Have things, obviously there’s the practical aspect where students can opt in to say, yes, you can contact this person under these circumstances.
00:21:10 Prof Michele Barbour
But do we know what the uptake has been?
00:21:12 Prof Michele Barbour
Can we tell what difference that has made?
00:21:15 Prof Michele Barbour
Or is that really almost impossible question to answer?
00:21:18 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
For me right now, it’s an impossible question to answer, but it would be extremely valuable because, you know, it’s one thing for there to be national guidance.
00:21:28 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
It’s another thing to know how that’s been adopted, but also when it’s
00:21:33 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
for a really specific, sensible reason, not been possible to adopt it, that would be a fantastic follow-up project that I haven’t been able to do yet, but I would absolutely be really invested in trying to unpack that question.
00:21:44 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, it would be fascinating to know, wouldn’t it?
00:21:46 Prof Michele Barbour
The themes that this research sort of circles around, which is student mental health, and I think particularly in terms of the project you’ve just been talking about, students in mental health difficulties, maybe even crisis, these are
00:22:01 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s hard to find the language without sounding like I’m trivialising it, but these are really, really difficult themes.
00:22:05 Prof Michele Barbour
These are very challenging things, very distressing themes.
00:22:08 Prof Michele Barbour
We’re talking about people who are in really, really bad places in their lives.
00:22:12 Prof Michele Barbour
And this is your daily work.
00:22:14 Prof Michele Barbour
How do you do that?
00:22:17 Prof Michele Barbour
Do you need to detach yourself from the day job, if you like, so that this isn’t, just doesn’t suffuse all of your thinking?
00:22:24 Prof Michele Barbour
I can’t imagine how that is possible.
00:22:27 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
It’s a really good question and it’s a question
00:22:31 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
we as a discipline are thinking about more and more that I think if I’m totally honest, historically we have not considered to the depth that we could have.
00:22:42 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I would say that because it is part of the day-to-day, most people in this space have been working in sensitive areas for a while and developed strategies of keeping the work, work, working in care and really giving it as a topic the respect it deserves.
00:23:00 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
whilst not being so consumed by it that there are no boundaries between the rest of your life.
00:23:07 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think most of us will be able to talk about that being implemented with mixed success at times.
00:23:13 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I would say on my side, I find it really important that my personal identity has this really key area that is about my work, but that my definition of myself extends beyond the work that I do.
00:23:28 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I would say that
00:23:30 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
My colleague Jacks Bennett and some other researchers she was working with published a really fantastic piece on strategies of supporting mental health researchers and researchers who are working in these sensitive areas.
00:23:41 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And one of the things they talk about is, you know, the importance of supervision.
00:23:45 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So thinking about particularly early career researchers who might be, for example, interviewing lots of people about quite distressing personal experiences, ensuring that they have a place where they can go and debrief someone who
00:24:00 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Knows the topic, somebody who is trustworthy, who might also be able to.
00:24:05 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
to help with questions around something heavy comes up in an interview.
00:24:09 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
You know, you’re going to have to work out in the moment, maybe this interview needs to pause.
00:24:14 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:24:15 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Maybe right now this person’s safety is really needs to be my primary, you know, priority.
00:24:24 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
But then at the end of that call, just having someone who you can check in with to say, this was quite a heavy call.
00:24:30 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
This is what came up.
00:24:32 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I just want to run through some of my thinking.
00:24:34 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Supervision, I think, is something in the mental health research space that is and will continue to become a much, much bigger topic of conversation and really building that into the way that projects work so it’s not an afterthought.
00:24:45 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So it’s actually just part of the day-to-day.
00:24:47 Prof Michele Barbour
I can picture almost like a network of mentors because all of those experiences are going to be unique, although I’m sure you see some things that have patterns over time, but having that network of people that you can speak to and
00:25:00 Prof Michele Barbour
understand what you’re going through and what you might experience in those interviews and those discussions must be very essential I suppose.
00:25:08 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think both forms of support actually.
00:25:10 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Networks are great amongst peers because you then at times get to hear what other people have experienced and simultaneously chime in and hear how other people chime in.
00:25:21 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
But also
00:25:22 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
That should never, in my experience or my perspective, come at the expense of opportunities to have that one-on-one with someone who is able to provide that more supervisory input, no matter how senior you are, actually, because there are times where you may need to share something that’s so sensitive that…
00:25:39 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
would not be appropriate.
00:25:42 Prof Michele Barbour
Yes, yeah, I can well understand that.
00:25:44 Prof Michele Barbour
So an incredible use of a Vice Chancellor’s Fellowship and so much insight and so much sharing as well with other institutions nationally and internationally.
00:25:52 Prof Michele Barbour
So extraordinary impact.
00:25:54 Prof Michele Barbour
And then bring us a little bit more up to date because since that time you’ve moved across to the School of Education, which is a whole different faculty from where you were before, a whole different set of sort of colleagues and so on to sort of get to know and development in your research.
00:26:07 Prof Michele Barbour
So tell us a little bit about
00:26:09 Prof Michele Barbour
The more recent years.
00:26:10 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
The more recent years have had a much more digital focus split in two areas.
00:26:17 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
One is a, it was an Innovate UK funded project working with a mental health app called TellMi, really trying to work out how users of the app were finding their experiences, how users of the app feel about the introduction of artificial intelligence into the mental health space, but also what
00:26:39 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
guidance could we develop for other app developers who wanted to create mental health apps for young people that were actually informed by academic insight?
00:26:48 Prof Michele Barbour
Just let me understand, is this a pre-existing app and you were brought in as like an academic collaborator into that?
00:26:54 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Exactly, yeah.
00:26:54 Prof Michele Barbour
And what does the app seek to, I guess, what does it seek to achieve and what was the gap that caused you to get involved?
00:27:01 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, so the app is almost a little bit like a feed where young people will share how they’re feeling
00:27:09 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
It might be that, for example, somebody posts about they’re really quite worried about an exam that they’re doing.
00:27:16 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Or it could be that they have been having a tough time with maybe a family difficulty and they’re not quite sure how they understand it.
00:27:25 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
The feed will then give other young people with a similar lived experience the opportunity to
00:27:30 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
empathise, the opportunity to learn from what this person is going through, the opportunity to offer support as a peer.
00:27:39 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
It’s all anonymous, it’s freely available.
00:27:43 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And where the app was when we started the project was they had an understanding of the impact that the app was having on quite young users.
00:27:53 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
But for those young adults who had different needs, who were using the app potentially for a different reason,
00:27:59 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
there was just a real gap in terms of their knowledge of the impact it was having on those people.
00:28:03 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So in particular, the kind of transitioning into out of adolescence and into young adulthood around, 18 year olds, early 20s.
00:28:11 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And because the app was changing, there was a need to understand from a user perspective how, for example, as I mentioned, users would feel about an app that had historically focused on peer-to-peer support involving elements of artificial intelligence.
00:28:26 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:28:26 Prof Michele Barbour
So was it that
00:28:28 Prof Michele Barbour
Historically, yes, that the young person posts and unknown people, but people of a similar age group and people who maybe have experienced a similar difficulty or at least are empathizing with reply.
00:28:39 Prof Michele Barbour
Was it the idea to switch over entirely to AI or would it be that you might get one comment from a human and one from an AI and you sort of juxtapose those?
00:28:47 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, it’s a really good question.
00:28:48 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
It was more that actually, if you were a young person posting on top of the comments that you would get from other peers, and it was really important to maintain that bit of it.
00:28:58 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
a large language model based artificial intelligence program would digest the post and recommend resources from within the app that were really relevant to what was being spoken about.
00:29:09 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So for example, if the post was about disordered eating, then the tool would pull from a list of articles and helplines and resources that were another part of the app.
00:29:20 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And it would just recommend them really directly to the user.
00:29:24 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Because otherwise, I mean,
00:29:25 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
One of the bits of feedback that we got from that research was, if you’re really struggling and you’ve posted on this website, you may not be in the right headspace to be trawling through hundreds of articles.
00:29:39 Prof Michele Barbour
Trying to work out which is the right one for you.
00:29:41 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, whereas this felt like it could be a potentially really useful use case of AI.
00:29:45 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So not in terms of kind of replacing that person to person support, but thinking how can AI?
00:29:52 Prof Michele Barbour
By sort of narrowing down on what resources might be useful to them.
00:29:57 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Exactly.
00:29:58 Prof Michele Barbour
So what was the role that you took in relation to this project?
00:30:01 Prof Michele Barbour
Because this was an app that was developed by somebody else, but they needed your expertise specifically.
00:30:05 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And it was very much that.
00:30:06 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
It was designing these studies that would help the app, TellMi, answer questions in a way that was academically rigorous, ethically sound,
00:30:18 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
based on all of the expertise within population health at Bristol, the School of Education, it was really about mapping and matching up the need of answering these big important questions with the expertise that we had at Bristol.
00:30:32 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So we kind of swooped in and provided that guidance on how to generate that insight and collect that data.
00:30:40 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And also we were analysing the data and simultaneously publishing academic outputs based on the findings.
00:30:46 Prof Michele Barbour
I mean, I’m here.
00:30:47 Prof Michele Barbour
This is an enterprise session.
00:30:49 Prof Michele Barbour
My job title is enterprise and innovation.
00:30:51 Prof Michele Barbour
I feel really reluctant, almost uncomfortable to describe this as a sort of form of industry collaborative research, research commercialization, because it doesn’t feel fitting to call it that.
00:31:02 Prof Michele Barbour
And yet you are an academic collaborating with a commercial company, admittedly for a social good, for a medical good.
00:31:08 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m not talking about profit here, but it’s a really wonderful example of how
00:31:14 Prof Michele Barbour
collaboration with an external commercial organisation can deliver a wonderful research impact that we can all get behind.
00:31:23 Prof Michele Barbour
You know, I really want to just sort of, well, I don’t know, do you identify this as something that’s in my domain as enterprise and innovation?
00:31:30 Prof Michele Barbour
Because I think I do, but I almost feel like I’m doing you a disservice to say that.
00:31:37 Prof Michele Barbour
I don’t know.
00:31:38 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
You know, I wondered the exact same thing.
00:31:41 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think there’s some tension there.
00:31:44 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
The bravest part of me does.
00:31:46 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Another voice does question exactly which kind of bucket this fits in.
00:31:52 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
But I think, a big part of stepping away from too many disciplinary titles and boundaries has also been about stepping away from some of the limitations that come with some of the badges that we have for our research.
00:32:04 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And I think
00:32:05 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
It really addresses a big social and societal need and TellMe and other project collaborators are really well placed to be doing that part of the project and we’re really well placed to be doing this part of the project.
00:32:18 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
But this feels like a really important aspect of kind of enterprise research.
00:32:24 Prof Michele Barbour
I completely agree.
00:32:25 Prof Michele Barbour
And I’m even more glad that you agree with me to an extent as well.
00:32:29 Prof Michele Barbour
I’m really glad that’s the way you see that.
00:32:31 Prof Michele Barbour
And I absolutely recognise the tension as well as the sort of, I suppose, the recognition.
00:32:36 Prof Michele Barbour
I mean, it’s interesting.
00:32:36 Prof Michele Barbour
Most of these discussions I have with researchers are about more, I suppose, overtly commercial enterprises.
00:32:45 Prof Michele Barbour
But when I sit and speak with them and whether they are
00:32:49 Prof Michele Barbour
biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, philosophers, classicists, even if what they’re trying to do is ultimately intended to make a profit, make a return on investment, the number one driver that comes up in these conversations time and time again, it’s not that.
00:33:07 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s not like making a return for your investors or even for yourself.
00:33:10 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s not driving that Maserati or whatever, you know.
00:33:12 Prof Michele Barbour
It is making a difference.
00:33:15 Prof Michele Barbour
It’s taking your research, your scholarship, your expertise, whatever that might be,
00:33:20 Prof Michele Barbour
and allowing it to, such a cliche, say make the world a better place, but genuinely that’s the best way I can sum it up that doesn’t segment it to a particular discipline.
00:33:27 Prof Michele Barbour
You know, whether people are making sort of, you know, better building materials, better, more and more environmentally sound transport, whether it’s, you know, whatever it might be, the overriding concern that I find drives most researchers is that this is a really important big
00:33:46 Prof Michele Barbour
difficult problem and what I’m doing, I’m doing it in a commercial environment because I feel that gives me the best opportunity of addressing that big problem.
00:33:54 Prof Michele Barbour
And the commercial bits come very much secondary to that.
00:33:57 Prof Michele Barbour
So in that sense, I think what you’re describing is not so very far away to some of the other topics I explore with colleagues, but maybe just takes a particular way of looking at it, I guess.
00:34:08 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think it probably does.
00:34:10 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
At the same time, I also feel like I’m probably much better set up for
00:34:15 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
some potential future, maybe more explicitly entrepreneurial endeavor via this access and exposure to this particular industrial partner.
00:34:26 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So I think I really don’t know what I’m going to be doing next, but I do feel like this project in particular has just really helped me step outside of the bounds of what academic research usually looks like.
00:34:36 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And I think it’s going to have a really positive impact on what I do next.
00:34:39 Prof Michele Barbour
That’s fantastic to hear, because it’s certainly been my belief, and to an extent my experience, that
00:34:44 Prof Michele Barbour
If as academics and researchers, we do embrace that wider view of actually commercial routes are viable and sort of applicable to me, it does widen what we can achieve.
00:34:53 Prof Michele Barbour
So if we just, even if we don’t have a plan, you know, do you have a plan for a spin-out company?
00:34:56 Prof Michele Barbour
Maybe not.
00:34:57 Prof Michele Barbour
But if you have that, at least in your worldview, it means you are less limited as to what you can do when the opportunity presents itself.
00:35:04 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, it certainly feels like less of an inappropriate thing to even be thinking about this side of the project than it did the last side of the project.
00:35:19 Prof Michele Barbour
So that work you’ve been doing with the TellMi app sounds really, really exciting and an unusual sort of face of entrepreneurship in academia.
00:35:27 Prof Michele Barbour
Has that, I don’t know, opened avenues into other applications of digital technology in mental health that are of interest to you?
00:35:35 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think being in that space of thinking about how young people use apps, thinking about how young people inhabit online spaces has moved me and colleagues into a new area where we’re really interested in, particular, what happens when a young person’s online activity and their mental health kind of collide, both in terms of the risks of that, but also we know that there are real significant and strong opportunities for digital technology in young people’s mental health.
00:36:04 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And
00:36:05 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
we received some Research England funding, me and my co-PI Lucy Biddle again, looking at how we can work to improve conversations between mental health practitioners and young people for those consultations, whether or not it’s a nurse, a psychiatrist or a psychologist.
00:36:25 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So another big part of the kind of digital piece of research that I’m doing is a Research England funded project with my co-PI Lucy Biddle.
00:36:34 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We are really interested in the conversations professionals, mental health professionals, are having with young people when their online activity and their mental health or their wellbeing are interacting.
00:36:47 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So thinking about things like body image from online spaces, cyberbullying, but also just how young people are connecting with each other in online spaces.
00:36:57 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
There are often times where there are conversations between professionals and these young people where
00:37:03 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
in the research we’ve been doing, young people have described feeling disempowered, feeling kind of discouraged from any online activity, or just feeling like there’s a real knowledge disconnect in terms of what they can bring into those conversations and the types of support they’re able to access.
00:37:19 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So in a collaborative co-development project with a group of practitioners who are seeing young people on a daily basis, we have generated and co-created this
00:37:32 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
toolkit of resources that practitioners can access freely available via the digital dialogues website we’ve created around improving those conversations.
00:37:43 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
You know, how to hold a non-judgmental conversation where you’re a listener and a learner rather than simply an oversimplifying how young people are existing in online spaces.
00:37:55 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And that’s been a really generative project.
00:37:57 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We had incredible demand.
00:38:00 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We
00:38:00 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
created this training session with these practitioners.
00:38:03 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And I think in the first three days, we’d advertised it in quite closed networks, actually.
00:38:09 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And we had about 400 or so sign ups, expression of interest, people who wanted to come and learn about how to support young people in the space.
00:38:17 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And I think it’s a real sign that a lot of mental health practitioners have identified they’ve had a lack of training in the space and they want to do better.
00:38:26 Prof Michele Barbour
I think that’s both incredible and also makes a huge amount of sense to me because
00:38:30 Prof Michele Barbour
I mean, the young people that are in this position, I mean, all young people are experiencing technologies and opportunities online, positive and negative, that absolutely did not exist when these health practitioners were trained and were that age.
00:38:45 Prof Michele Barbour
So they cannot be, they cannot fully identify with what these young people are doing because it didn’t exist at that stage in their lives, whether they were having difficulties or not.
00:38:54 Prof Michele Barbour
So even having their sort of language and recognition, I mean, I know as
00:38:59 Prof Michele Barbour
both a parent and an educator of undergraduates, that what they do and how they live and interact and communicate is radically different from what I experienced myself.
00:39:07 Prof Michele Barbour
And you learn as you go.
00:39:09 Prof Michele Barbour
And I guess that’s kind of achievable if things are going okay.
00:39:11 Prof Michele Barbour
But if somebody’s having difficulties, just having that awareness and that training and then getting into how you support them, I’m not surprised.
00:39:20 Prof Michele Barbour
There’s huge demand for that because it’s not the kind of thing you can make up.
00:39:24 Prof Michele Barbour
You know, you need to understand.
00:39:26 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And this is it.
00:39:27 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
we’ve done really in-depth qualitative research with young people, various different lived experiences, life experiences.
00:39:35 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We’ve been working with a group of young people for years at this point in a previous iteration of the project.
00:39:41 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And in that data set, in that insight, we’re not being told we need a psychologist to understand absolutely everything or identify with absolutely everything, but it’s how
00:39:54 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Could they feel safe and comfortable enough to talk about something they’re experiencing online?
00:39:59 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
If they feel like the first thing they’re going to be told is to just switch off their phone.
00:40:03 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:40:03 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Or if they feel like the first thing they’re going to be told is to, for example, just…
00:40:09 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Turn off, just turn off the phone.
00:40:11 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, don’t use that app.
00:40:12 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, it’s just, it’s not an option, is it?
00:40:14 Prof Michele Barbour
But I can see how A, a healthcare practitioner might not recognise that and B, a young person might fear that even if that’s not the case.
00:40:22 Prof Michele Barbour
So yeah, I can see the value.
00:40:23 Prof Michele Barbour
So you say even with a very limited sort of promotion, you’ve got over 400 signups.
00:40:28 Prof Michele Barbour
Is this something you can scale?
00:40:30 Prof Michele Barbour
Is this something that can actually be rolled out to the full extent of the audience that would like to benefit, which I imagine is vast?
00:40:36 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, I think there’s something in working out who this training should be mandatory for.
00:40:43 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And that was another arm of the research.
00:40:45 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We’ve been working with policy experts, taking in professionals who work in the space, not just
00:40:52 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
academically or clinically, but also, a lot of the guidance from the Royal Colleges, like the Royal College of Psychiatry, has been suggesting that practitioners need to be asking about online harms.
00:41:03 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
However, it’s very unclear at the moment who training in the space should be mandatory for.
00:41:08 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So that’s a really big policy question.
00:41:10 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
But in terms of who should be delivering the training, that’s also something we’re trying to work out.
00:41:14 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
How would that, like, what would the model of delivery be?
00:41:17 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
What types of roles would it be?
00:41:19 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Would it need to be kind of very frontline staff or
00:41:22 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
wouldn’t need to be the people supervising those staff members.
00:41:25 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We’ve been left with a lot of really big questions at the end of the project.
00:41:27 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We’ve got some great feedback.
00:41:29 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We’ve got a pilot.
00:41:31 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
We just have to work out what the next steps of this project are going to be.
00:41:33 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah, to really, to really scale it up.
00:41:35 Prof Michele Barbour
An exciting scale-up challenge.
00:41:37 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Very exciting scale-up challenge.
00:41:39 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I’ll be coming to you to talk about it.
00:41:40 Prof Michele Barbour
I look forward to that.
00:41:42 Prof Michele Barbour
Myles J, it’s clear that co-production is such an important part of, I think, almost all the research you’ve described.
00:41:49 Prof Michele Barbour
I might be an obvious question, but why is that?
00:41:51 Prof Michele Barbour
Why does that make such an important foundation of how you work?
00:41:54 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I would say it’s very integral now.
00:41:56 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
There have been parts previously in my academic research where it hasn’t been as central.
00:42:02 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
More than ever, I am thinking about the ways in which we’ve had really restricted and restrictive ideas of what expertise means.
00:42:12 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And I have had and learned so much from non-academics.
00:42:17 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I feel like the conversations I’ve had with people who have either a professional lived experience of some of the stuff that I work on, or a personal lived experience of maybe mental health difficulty, provide such rich insights.
00:42:32 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And historically, maybe we’ve validated that within the space of a focus group or a survey or a workshop.
00:42:40 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
But there is a role for that insight at pretty much every stage of
00:42:46 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
the research I do.
00:42:48 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And when me and my colleagues have been brave enough to, ensure that the people around the table that are actually informing decisions are there, I’ve just found that those projects have been the most interesting.
00:43:01 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
They’ve been the most responsive to need.
00:43:05 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And it’s just something I really want to advocate in the work that I do and the work that I’m involved in.
00:43:10 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And I feel like the colleagues who are as on board with that mission and that agenda
00:43:14 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
as me have similarly just taught me so much about how to do that in a way that’s legitimate and not a tick box.
00:43:22 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And being able to be okay with the greys, what sometimes me and my colleagues are talking about, being okay with the way in which involvement might make a project more complicated or slower or require more time.
00:43:39 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I’m really hoping to, like I said, just be a little bit braver about the way in which that is generative rather than a delay or a barrier.
00:43:48 Prof Michele Barbour
I can probably see that the benefit and why, even if it does constitute a delay, it’s worth it, you know.
00:43:53 Prof Michele Barbour
I would imagine it’s easier to recruit some groups of patients and indeed the professionals, like the healthcare professionals you mentioned.
00:44:00 Prof Michele Barbour
than others.
00:44:01 Prof Michele Barbour
How do you contend with that?
00:44:03 Prof Michele Barbour
How do you reach the sort of difficult to reach groups or do you, I suppose, reach the easy to reach groups and then build out from there?
00:44:10 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Yeah, I mean, we could have a podcast just on this.
00:44:14 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think there are really interesting ways that we describe people who are not in the room.
00:44:19 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
You know, some people use the word or the language, poorly served.
00:44:24 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Some people, I guess, recontextualize why that voice has been missing.
00:44:29 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And I think
00:44:30 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I can’t speak on behalf of this colleague, but one of my PhD students has been recruiting young women to be in her study.
00:44:38 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And I think one of the strategies that she’s found really useful is going to community centres and actually being there to talk about why the research is important and help people with their buy-in to the study, as opposed to, for example, you know, receiving an e-mail out of the blue and not really knowing how and why the research is
00:44:58 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
still have recruitment materials and information sheets, but I do think there is something really powerful about having a person in the room to say and advocate for why somebody should give up their time to be part of research.
00:45:09 Prof Michele Barbour
Absolutely, having a person in the room and in that person’s room.
00:45:12 Prof Michele Barbour
So volunteers don’t have to actually turn up somewhere in the university or elsewhere, but going to where the people circulate that you want to talk to and explaining to them.
00:45:21 Prof Michele Barbour
It was in it for them as well, I think, yeah.
00:45:23 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Absolutely.
00:45:24 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And it was a real barrier and a block within that project.
00:45:26 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
But yeah, Kira, that student, has done fantastic work to ensure that the work that is now going to describe and demonstrate the experience of this demographic is actually including as many people from various different backgrounds as possible.
00:45:40 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So.
00:45:41 Prof Michele Barbour
Fantastic.
00:45:42 Prof Michele Barbour
I do think thinking of that has seemed to have developed a good deal in the last few years, actually, at least from where I sit.
00:45:46 Prof Michele Barbour
And I think that’s a really positive and necessary thing.
00:45:50 Prof Michele Barbour
Thank you so much for such a fascinating sort of set of insights into your research and your sort of the commercial dimensions of your research, if I can call it that.
00:46:01 Prof Michele Barbour
You’ve done so many different things in your time here at Bristol and indeed before that at Exeter.
00:46:07 Prof Michele Barbour
If you were to have a kind of, I don’t know, window back in time to PhD student you to when you were starting out at Exeter or maybe you were in that grueling kind of mid phase of your PhD,
00:46:18 Prof Michele Barbour
If that person could look forward in time and see what you’re doing now and everything you’ve done and the impacts that has had over the intervening years, what would young Myles J think and say?
00:46:31 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Wow, what would he say?
00:46:34 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think he would be, I can picture him and he’s smiling.
00:46:40 Prof Michele Barbour
Okay, that’s good.
00:46:41 Prof Michele Barbour
Yeah.
00:46:41 Prof Michele Barbour
Knowingly or with surprise in his eyes.
00:46:42 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Is it bad if I say knowingly?
00:46:47 Prof Michele Barbour
Not at all, no.
00:46:49 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I don’t think that he would be surprised to see that I’m doing something I’m really interested in.
00:46:54 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
He might be surprised about, for example, just how much I’ve been able to stick to being interdisciplinary.
00:47:01 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think there might be some surprise about still being able to, you know, not
00:47:06 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
pigeonhole myself too much.
00:47:08 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I just think on the whole, I think he’d be pretty chuffed.
00:47:10 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think he would feel like I’m closer to the applied end and I was able to do the kind of research that I maybe thought would have just been really hard to justify.
00:47:19 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
And part of it is around the kind of involvement and co-production side of things.
00:47:23 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
I think it’s been easier than never, or at least there’s been more appetite for that work.
00:47:29 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
So I think he would be very chuffed that I’ve been able to move more towards that work.
00:47:33 Prof Michele Barbour
I think he should be.
00:47:34 Prof Michele Barbour
I couldn’t agree more.
00:47:37 Prof Michele Barbour
Doctor Mouse Jay Linton, thank you very much indeed.
00:47:39 Prof Michele Barbour
This has been a really fascinating conversation and I hope you’ve enjoyed it a 10th as much as I have because I’ve had a really, really great time.
00:47:45 Prof Michele Barbour
So thank you very much indeed again.
00:47:47 Dr Myles-Jay Linton
Thank you very much for having me.
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