Anna Noel-Storr, ALOIS Study Manager/Trials Search Coordinator

I started working on the ALOIS project in early 2008. I knew nothing about trials, evidence or dementia. In fact for that reason I initially turned the job down. The interview hadn’t gone well: when asked what I thought of the Cochrane Collaboration by my future boss I had rather unimpressively replied “er…it’s big”. Luckily they were a bit desperate and I was persuaded. Since then (almost) every day I think that I probably have one of the best jobs in the world.

What do I do? Well, if you are a volunteer with the ALOIS community then you will know that I’m the one who finds the study papers and assigns them to you to extract key information and then publishes that information so that it is accessible to all. I find it very rewarding to know that collectively we are making the evidence on treatments in dementia available to all who should have access to that information.

Since starting work on ALOIS back in 2008 I have learnt so much. I wasn’t remotely into science at school (I have two arts degrees and a pseudo-science degree) but working in evidence in such a fascinating and important area as dementia has brought out the closet scientist in me!

And even my children are picking up on it (albeit using it against me at times) when they ask: “but what is the evidence for that mummy?”