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How DPhil student Morgan Mitchell is uncovering unconventional routes into the University.

Morgan Mitchell © Morgan Mitchell

Morgan Mitchell is a third year DPhil student and is a member of the Plasticity Group.  On the 2 December 2024, Morgan launched the ‘Other Than Oxford’ project in Reuben College. She spoke to us about her research, and what she hopes the project will achieve.

Hi Morgan! Can you tell me a bit more about yourself, and your research?

I'm a DPhil student, based at WIN. I work on a project that looks at the role of sleep in stroke recovery. So, we take stroke survivors in their chronic phase (so they've had a stroke more than six months ago) that have some kind of upper limb impairment, and try to make their rehab better by leveraging sleep. To do this, we train them on movement tasks during wake and each of their movements are tagged with a different sound. Then, when they go to sleep, we play those sounds back to them in the hope that it boosts the memory consolidation that's associated with those very specific memories.

Hopefully, when they then come back to learning how to move again, it doesn't have to be as intense or they don't have to do it as many times because they would have replayed those memories already during sleep, so they will be strengthened and more easily accessed.

 

That sounds a bit like ‘muscle memory’? Does it work?

We don't know. It’s a phenomena that's not based in your muscles - it's in the brain. There's some good evidence that it works outside of movement, like in terms of remembering facts or more often times it's done with like pairs of words and things like that. There seems to be good evidence that it should work in the lab. I think our difficulty is that we're also trying to take it straight to patients’ homes, so there's lots of limitations. I think in doing this, there's a lot of hope in the sense that we can think about other ways to access or make stroke rehab better.

 

How does this connect with sleep?

So what happens during sleep is essentially the brain is already spontaneous replaying all of the memory traces for things that you've already learned throughout the day while you sleep. But normally these memory traces compete with each other. It becomes hard for one memory to become more prominent than the other: there's no natural bias towards one or the other. What we’re trying to do is bias this normally spontaneous phenomenon towards what you would want to remember more over other memories.

 Other Than Oxford Photography projectOther Than Oxford Photography project

It sounds like your work ties in with lots of other researchers around Oxford?

Yes, although I’m based at WIN I work with people across the University, including at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Experimental Psychology, and BNDU.

Heidi Johansen-Berg is my supervisor. She is interested in stroke and her lab is plasticity-based, and memory is a plasticity phenomenon. But my work spreads across loads of places. Because we're trying to access people in their own homes, we need a low density version of what we would use in the lab to monitor sleep (EEG) but that is also able to deliver sounds in an automated way. What normally happens in the lab is you're awake and you play the sounds back to them, but if we’re going into people's homes, we need to do it without me there. Originally, we thought we could use EEG devices that are available on the consumer market, but no such device exists. So, we started a big collaboration with the Institute of Engineering to create some kind of low-density EEG device.

 

Did you always want to pursue a career in neuroscience?

Originally, I wanted to do medicine at school but that didn't happen for various reasons. I knew that I didn't want to just do a course that might get me onto a medicine in the future, and I thought the brain was actually really cool! From my A levels, I felt that if we get to the point of understanding the brain then we can understand everything, and I thought that was really, really fun. I knew I wanted to do not psychology, but neuroscience, and learn more about the brain – and that’s what I did for my undergrad.

 

What made you decide on this research area?

My undergrad was wet lab based, looking at cells and molecular biology. It wasn't until third year that I did a module on imaging. I realised that we can look at the human brain itself, rather than animal brains in the lab. But I also really liked sports. So, a thought passed through my mind that maybe I'd be interested in sports psychology, but thinking more about the brain and neuroscience. I ended up going to do a Sports Science Masters, where I did a project with an academic that was interested in motor neuroscience and looked at how people learn new movement skills - which got me interested in the neuroscience behind movement.

 People at Reuben College looking at a photograph on a stand

Back in December, you launched ‘Other Than Oxford’? Can you tell me more about it?

It’s a photography project that aims to celebrate diversity within STEM research. There’s a portrait of each individual on the wall, and a booklet that corresponds to each picture, telling their story.

Reuben College has a Public Engagement in Research fund. I saw that open at some point before the end of Michaelmas last year and this idea just came to me. At the time, I was stressing about my transfer Viva, which felt very insular. It got me thinking: there's other than Oxford for me, this is only one part of my life. I imagine that's how it feels for lots of other people, and it would be nice for them to be seen outside of this bubble, and maybe see a bit of themselves represented the fabric and culture that makes up Oxford.

There are lots of people who are at Oxford that are not from within the traditional Oxford system or haven't just come through the pipeline of going to some kind of competitive or private school. There are lots of other interesting people that do good research that have come through other more unconventional or non-traditionally represented means. And I felt we needed to shed light on those people as well.

 

What are you hoping to achieve with Other Than Oxford?

I think for within the University I’d like to shed light on representation. It can be very easy to become quite insular and think that you're the only one struggling to feel like you fit in at Oxford: there’s lots of ‘oxfordisms’ like a transfer viva or even just dinner etiquette. I think it’s good to be able to see there's actually a rich tapestry of people that make up Oxford and that's something I feel we should recognize way more.

 

Why do you think it's important to do this?

I think I quite strongly back the idea that you can't be what you can't see. I definitely didn't consider research as a career for me, until I climbed up the rungs in research and realized that ‘oh, there are options’. I just never really thought that getting a doctorate was ever something that I could consider. I’m hoping other young people might be inspired by seeing other people that have unconventional journeys to get to Oxford, or into research. Diversity’s a really good thing, and it keeps the University going.

 

How did the launch go and what reception did you get?

It was really good. I was overwhelmed by how many people were there! Two thirds of the participants came and were super grateful and excited to see what we'd done with the with the photos and stories. It felt like for what was originally planned as quite a small event felt, its scope was quite far reaching already. I had lots of encouraging conversations with people that now also want to host the exhibition and want to take it to schools and things like that. So yeah, kind of can't believe that happened, to be honest!

 

What’s next for you?

I think having offers of having Other Than Oxford in other spaces is really cool. I think it would be good to see that and think about how we can increase reach. It was nice to see how many different groups of people were at the launch, and it suggests that there's a need for it to go to other places. It's flattering for these photos to go somewhere, but at the same time I'm quite keen for it not to immortalize these people and them to be the underrepresented people at Oxford - I'm sure there are so many others. So perhaps for there to be a round two.

 

‘Other Than Oxford’ is on semi-permanent display and can be viewed now at Reuben College. You can follow the project on Instagram via their handle @otherthanoxford.