Question: Did you have to stop your work when the pandemic hit?

Ellen Smith answered on 4 Mar 2021:

I was in quite a lucky position that I had finished collecting the data for the two big intervention studies for my PhD when the pandemic hit. But as the university and research labs had to shut, all of my biological samples (like blood samples) weren’t able to be analysed and just sat in the freezer for months on end! For a PhD you have to write up your work into a thesis (that is about 70,000 words in total), so for the last year I’ve been concentrating on writing the parts of that, that I could do without that data.
Because we need participants to come into the research lab to take part in studies, that’s still not allowed but hopefully we can open up in the next few months and continue with some new studies.