Improving Youth Mental Health | The Enterprise Sessions with Dr Myles-Jay Linton

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

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, but my manager, who actually has then kind of gone on to become a really great mentor, Jo Coast, was really keen on me holding both as priorities. So finishing the PhD well was also prioritizing the role that I'd started here. So I think being able to work on a PhD without fear, while simultaneously being able to prioritize the PhD, 

00:01:49 Dr Myles-Jay Linton 

and start this big, new, important project, there was real ample scope for me to try and do both really well. So I was really grateful for that. 

00:01:56 Prof Michele Barbour 

That's great. The benefits of a good manager *** mentor can't be underestimated, can they? What was the role that attracted you to Bristol? What was this exciting job that was too good to look away from? 

00:02:07 Dr Myles-Jay Linton 

Yeah, it was a particular part of Bristol Medical School that was very focused on applied healthcare research. 

00:02:13 Dr Myles-Jay Linton 

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 

00:02:36 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. 

00:03:00 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? 

00:03:23 Dr Myles-Jay Linton 

In as much as I really sometimes struggle to be. 

00:03:28 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 

00:03:57 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. 

00:04:15 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 

00:04:41 Prof Michele Barbour 

sort of illustrate that with a little bit. 

00:04:43 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 

00:04:59 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 

00:05:29 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 

00:05:55 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? 

00:06:12 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. 

00:06:19 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? 

00:06:31 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. 

00:06:40 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. 

00:07:04 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 

00:07:25 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. 

00:07:36 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, 

00:07:47 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. 

00:08:02 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. 

00:08:16 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. 

00:08:29 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 

00:08:45 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? 

00:08:59 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. 

00:09:15 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, 

00:09:45 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. 

00:09:54 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. 

00:10:04 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. 

00:10:30 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? 

00:11:00 Prof Michele Barbour 

and what actually happened in real life. 

00:11:03 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? 

00:11:28 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 

00:11:50 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. 

00:12:18 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. 

00:12:40 Prof Michele Barbour 

Is the sort of picture that has revealed? I mean, first of all, your aspiration to 

00:12:46 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? 

00:13:11 Dr Myles-Jay Linton 

A big part of this was actually just looking at what does 

00:13:15 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 

00:13:37 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. 

00:13:52 Prof Michele Barbour 

Measuring different things. 

00:13:52 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 

00:14:06 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. 

00:14:26 Prof Michele Barbour 

So even with different measurement tools, we're still seeing that rise. 

00:14:30 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 

00:14:47 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. 

00:15:02 Prof Michele Barbour 

You mentioned, Myles J, 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? 

00:15:23 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.