Spotlight On: Coco Newton

We are back with our 'Spotlight On' interview series, shedding light on inspiring women working in the field of neuroscience and reflecting on their distinct backgrounds and career journeys. The questions posed to these individuals explore the themes of job perks and challenges, developing new skills, their inspirations in the neuroscience field, and goals for the future. Stay tuned to see new interviews every few weeks from women in a range of neuroscience-related professions!

Dr Coco Newton, senior research fellow across UCL, Cambridge, and Strathclyde University.

We interviewed Coco Newton, a Senior Research Fellow working at the intersection of neuroscience, cognition, and emerging technologies. With academic roots in cognitive science and a current focus on wearable neurotechnology, Coco’s work explores how the brain and body interact through design.

In this interview, Coco reflects on navigating collaborations across science, design, and engineering, and how speculative design can shape the future of brain-computer interfaces. Coco also shares insights into the importance of accessibility, trust, and agency in human-technology interaction, and outlines her vision for more inclusive, socially grounded approaches in neuroscience and tech development.

Can you tell us about your background in science, your current position and what interested you about neuroscience initially?

I originally got into science through my biology teacher at school - and probably a bit due to watching Grey's Anatomy - and decided I wanted to be a doctor. I tailored all my A-levels to medicine and then ended up not getting into medical school, even though I had the grades. I think there was just some reason it didn't happen. 

I ended up going to do biomedical science, which was my fall-back fifth option on my UCAS application form, which was completely randomly chosen. I didn't even really know what the degree was! I ended up doing that and around that time I already had my interest in neuroscience. There is so much to be curious about the brain and neuroscience in general - it defines us as humans, but also there's a dualistic sense of not knowing what consciousness is and what makes us human, so I just found that fascinating.

I got into research during the extramural year between my second and third year of my degree, where you could spend time in industry. I decided to try out research in a lab and to see if research was something that I liked doing. I ended up working in a lab doing spatial cognition - how the brain perceives space - and I wanted to work in that area because, before wanting to be a doctor, I wanted to be an architect. And so, when I was choosing where to go for that extramural year, I was hovering a little bit between whether to drop out of BioMed and to study architecture instead. But I stayed and completely fell in love with the unknowns in the field and its real world impact - particularly in Alzheimer’s research, where I now work on using navigation to try and design better cognitive tests for diagnosis.

More broadly, I work in that very translational applied area of science and health systems design and engineering, which is about how we get these new innovations from science into the clinic. How do we build that road map between research and reality? In a nutshell, that's where I am now.

Before your current position, what PhD and postdocs did you do and where? 

I did my extramural year as an undergrad at UCL, and my undergraduate was at King's College London and then moved straight to Cambridge to do a PhD. That year of research in industry had already given me the experience I needed. I didn't see much point in a master’s because I just wanted to crack on with the research. Then I went back to UCL for my first postdoc, which was working as part of an Alzheimer's Research UK initiative called EDoN (which stands for early detection of neurodegeneration), and that was a big cross-University cross-industry initiative to try and design a tool kit of wearable tech for dementia detection. 

Then I won my current fellowship which has been my postdoc for the last two years, which is a little bit at UCL and a little bit at Cambridge and a little bit at TU Delft in the Netherlands. It's one of these fellowships where the only prerequisite is that you have to switch disciplines from your PhD discipline to a new postdoctoral discipline and they pay you directly. So, you're almost like an independent scientist. Then I figured, well, I have this opportunity. I'm going to learn from as many different people and as many different places as I can.

That's very cool. I was going to ask you how your fellowship works split between different institutions. They must have specialists and different knowledge in each institution. Do you spend time at each, completing different parts of your research?

Yeah, pretty much that's how it works out. I still live in Cambridge, and I go down to UCL about one day a week. For the past year or so, I’ve been going out to the Netherlands for about two to three weeks at a time, every couple of months. I'm quite lucky that my parents live in the Netherlands, so when I go over there, I have free accommodation. Otherwise, it wouldn't have worked as well. In the TU Delft position, I'm based in the industrial design faculty. I work with designers there who specialise in digital transformation of healthcare but also focus specifically on patient-centred design. How you engage patients and clinicians into the design process of creating new ways to treat and diagnose disease has been eye-opening. 

In the classic quantitative sciences, like neuroscience in the UK, the discussion of the importance of PPI (Patient and Public Involvement) has been around a while, but only now people are starting to, funders specifically, ask you to have a plan for PPI involvement in the design of research. For design, it's the complete core of the research; you couldn't do design research without having the user involved. So, that's really changed my thinking about my science. 

At Cambridge, I'm in design engineering, which is similarly about how you create solutions for people's needs. But it's much more engineering, so I work with a professor who designed a healthcare improvement toolkit based in engineering and risk-management thinking. It’s been a really good way to understand how you actually think about healthcare in a new way. 

At UCL, it's the neuroscience component of how we use the understanding of the brain to design better cognitive assessments for detection of Alzheimer's.

You said you didn’t have a background in design. Do you have much involvement in the design itself, or do you have a supportive role in the process by supplying your neuroscience knowledge?

It's been a huge year of learning. When I made the pivot from my pure background and training in cognitive neuroscience to design and design engineering, it wasn’t only that I had to learn different methods and information, or read new papers - it required a complete shift in mindset. It changed how I thought about how the world works, how I made connections between things, and how I formulated research questions.

I am directly involved with the design work and the design research. I run workshops with participants and I have been involved in the design iterations of the current cognitive test that we're designing between UCL and Cambridge. I feel that I still have this very deep knowledge of cognitive neuroscience, but instead of being like the letter ‘I’, I am now a letter ‘T’ because I can branch out. I have gained a sufficiently deep understanding of design and design engineering disciplines so that I can have a conversation with a designer, and if they refer to a seminal paper in the field, I will understand that now, whereas before I wouldn't have known that. I think it's been really fun.

I enjoy teaching my design colleagues about how we think in science - it's not the same way that they've been taught in their discipline about designing experiments and testing hypotheses, but they're very complementary. It’s just nice being able to take it back into the neuroscience world. I think it's actually leading to better neuroscience in our group at UCL than perhaps before.

Yes, and it's really important to have people with different disciplines working together. In science, often people are from similar scientific backgrounds and career paths, which can lead to everyone having the same approaches and views. 

Yes and I honestly believe that interdisciplinary science is the key to making bigger breakthroughs in the future.

Can you tell us more about the digital spatial memory test that you helped to develop and how they are, or will be, implemented into the NHS? Why do you think it's so important to improve what we already have for diagnosing dementia patients?

There are a couple of different spatial tests that we've been working on in the past few years. The one that I was doing in my PhD was this immersive virtual reality test that enabled people to walk around, which is really important when you're trying to navigate because we never really navigate by sitting down! It was successful at showing early changes in navigation that might signal cognitive decline in midlife. 

The other test that we're working on is more of a tablet-based spatial memory test and it engages, specifically, the hippocampus. We think that this second test is more ready for clinical translation, just because there are less constraints associated with using it. It's much easier to be able to say to a GP, “look, there's a new tablet-based cognitive test”, than it is to say, “here's an immersive virtual reality system. You need a room, kit and trained people”.  The degree of feasibility is a really important one here. Even with trying to run studies using a new tablet-based test in a GP, or doing usability studies with patients or members of the public, it's still a huge barrier that the feedback we're getting is: it just feels so abstract and I can't see where I would be doing this in the GP because GP appointments are only 10 minutes long. The current assessments that we call pen and paper assessments - something like the MMSE, which asks people to remember names and addresses - are supposed to only take five to ten minutes, but they often take longer, especially with patients that have got quite severe memory and cognitive problems. It's trying to work out how we can introduce this new test within the current system and minimise the time that GPs need to spend in the appointment. Could patients do the test in a waiting room, or in an empty room somewhere in the clinic? Or could they do it at home if they have access to a tablet or a computer? 

It's trying to design the test to be maximally inclusive of all the different variations patients could present, whether the GPs have time, if the clinic has a spare room or not, and if the clinic can afford to purchase new tablets. So, we're trying to landscape all these different variations in what a GP and a diagnostic process and a type of patient could be. And then knowing all of that variation, trying to design the test so it can be used in those different situations. It's really hard because there's so many moving parts and even trying to find clinicians that have the time and the willingness to be involved in the research - we call them our local champion GPs - it's really hard because they are up against the wall in the NHS at the moment. How can you change a system that's so broken and so time- and resource-poor? That's a really hard question.

I'm assuming the test is used in conjunction with other existing tests when it's being trialled, but is it used purely diagnostically, or would you use it to track deterioration once something is flagged up?

It's a good question. When you talk about a test that's in the GP, the initial gatekeeping stage of the diagnostic process, we view it as an extra data point that GPs can have to inform their overall clinical decision making. They are still going to be taking the history, speaking to the family, doing exclusionary blood tests. Then you might do the classic pen and paper test. But you might also do this new digital test, so you have an extra layer of information. What happens in primary care is the GP will decide whether or not to refer a patient for further diagnostic work-ups in secondary care and that would be your memory assessment service. 

At the secondary care level,, we view the potential of spatial tests as more for monitoring and tracking deterioration over time. We hope this will be useful to inform treatment windows for the new Alzheimer’s drugs; they're not necessarily the be-all and end-all drugs, but they're definitely a start of a new era in which we can offer people a treatment, but we need to know when the optimum time is to give someone a treatment. Spatial tests could have that role as well; just because someone has biomarkers, it doesn't mean that they're going to progress on to dementia. It's the balance between having biological information of the presence of the disease, but also clinical information that is beginning to affect the individual. That's the role that we think spatial tasks can have. 

Then the question is, well, how much does that clinical need change over time? So yeah, there are multiple use cases for how you can think about new cognitive tests in the clinic.

As you've said, you work with patients on the design front. Do you ever find it difficult working with patients? Is it ever frustrating?

In my PhD, well, throughout my entire career I've been working with research participants, so I've always been running behavioural studies, cognitive studies, and brain imaging studies. They have been either with healthy volunteers or patients with cognitive decline. At the moment, the real challenge I'm having with this cognitive test is that, although we've tried to design it to be as simple and usable as possible, it's still really difficult for people to interact with it in a way that we're not actually causing them more stress and worry about the fact that, not only do they have to do a test, but actually the test itself is really hard and getting to grips with the digital tablet is really hard. I find it frustrating that we can't get it right for the patients and the participants. That’s the hard part of academia in that things move slowly. I find it difficult to sit down with patients and ask them to help us do a test when I know that that test is not the best version it could be, but we have to go through that to get the evidence, to get the feedback, to know where the improvements need to be made.

But I love working with participants. Hearing their stories is grounding. It brings the research to life and reminds you of the real people behind the data.

That’s really important. You’ve then got an end user to envision using the product, which removes the separation that scientists often have.

In your field of study, what gaps do you think there are, either clinically or preclinically? How do you foresee them being closed? 

I think the biggest gap at the moment is the level of uncertainty that people at the beginning of their own journey in the disease are faced with; uncertainty about what's going to happen to them - how do I get my GP to listen to me? I know something is wrong, but these tests are telling me there's nothing wrong. Then when it goes through to a diagnosis, there's uncertainty on the care perspective of, “I don't know how to manage my loved one who's living with dementia. I don't have training for this”. 

Even the professional care staff don't have specific training for dementia. There's so much unnecessary pain and suffering that people experience that I think could be alleviated if there was better communication between the clinical and family side if there were better tools. 

The whole thing about the treatments for Alzheimer's disease is they're so wanted and needed, but the ones that we have now are not the right answer. How do you tell someone that's read about a potential new treatment that could save their life, or save their loved one's life, that it's not really the thing that they're looking for? I feel like it's a constant process of just really getting people's hopes up and disappointing them.

The biggest work to be done is more on the experience side of the disease rather than the biological or the preclinical research side. We need both. We need new treatments. We need new, better diagnostics. But people are in pain today from things that we could alleviate with having a better healthcare system and better trained staff. That's really where I'm trying to think about making a difference. 

I work with someone who's living with dementia who is so engaged in research and so determined to make a difference with the time that they've got left.  You can't help but want to redirect all of your resources and effort to being behind that individual. People living with dementia don't know about amyloid, Tau, neurovascular and immune components, but they do know exactly what it's like to be told that they’ve got Alzheimer's disease. Trying to listen to them and bolster their work, efforts, and voices is where the gap is.

It's a scary diagnosis - I've heard about people not going to appointments and putting off getting a diagnosis.

Do you find, when you work with patients, that sometimes there are people that are less engaged or don't want to hear the diagnosis?

Absolutely. Some people avoid diagnosis out of fear or stigma. Those people rarely join research studies - we call them underserved populations. But they’re not hard to reach; we’re just not reaching them well enough. There are definitely people where the fear and the stigma of dementia is so immense that they're just ignoring it. There's also cultures and parts of society where dementia just isn't a thing - it's just normal ageing. For example, in some languages there is no word for dementia. So how do you even begin to engage those communities on the topic of dementia research when it's just not a thing?But I think that's actually led me to shift my research away from thinking about the diagnostic stage - i.e., what happens when someone goes to the GP - to thinking about what happens before people even go to their GP or know to go to their GP? And what are the innovations and research projects we can do to help facilitate better awareness among the general public of what is a symptom to worry about and what's just normal ageing?How can technology inform that? A common challenge in dementia diagnosis is carers being able to communicate their concerns about subtle changes effectively to the GP. Meanwhile, the GP can only assess the person based on what they observe during the appointment. People can keep diaries or they can remember specific events, but if you could have some form of objective data that is allied to what the carer or the person living with dementia is telling the GP, that would be a whole new era of diagnosis. 

So, what does that look like? Is home monitoring something that we as a society are comfortable with? Not the classic trope of Big Brother and being watched constantly, but there are now non-invasive technologies that you don't need a camera or a microphone for - you can work out how someone is coping around the home. If we can begin to open those conversations with different communities, would that change the narrative on dementia? 

If one day we have drugs that when you give them to someone during a time where they have biological evidence of disease, but they do not yet have mild or even moderate dementia, we can target that sweet spot where you could prevent the clinical side from happening. If that does become a reality in the future, then I hope this would change the stigma and the fear around the disease and help people come forward. In the same way that we've seen in cancer; it's gone from being the ‘big C’ that people don't talk about to something that is still a really enormous challenge in healthcare, but survival rates are improving. Perhaps now people aren't as afraid of cancer as they once were, because it's a better outcome now.

What would you say your most enjoyable aspects of your current job are, and what are the most challenging aspects? 

I think the most enjoyable aspects are the opportunity that I've been given through this fellowship to learn so much from other disciplines, scientists, designers, and engineers. The thing I enjoy most is when my way of  thinking is challenged and I've learned that there's another way to think about it and it's actually a better way, or a more conducive way, to finding an answer. The continual learning that you get to experience as a scientist is something that I just love about the job. If I ever had to leave academia, that's the thing I'd probably miss the most; the opportunity to just go down a rabbit hole of reading because you can.

The other things I love are the very translational nature of the research that you are able, on your day-to-day, to make decisions about a project or a device or a piece of technology that is going to have an impact in someone's life. It's not so removed as traditional bench research where you don't know, necessarily, how the outcome of what you're doing is going to impact society. You might be there just for the curiosity of it, which is fine as well.

Being spread quite thinly across different disciplines is challenging to maintain. It's not keeping up to date with literature in one field, it's now in several fields. If I present at design conferences, sometimes the questions completely throw me because I've never considered them before and it's making sure that I am OK with not knowing the answer yet. It is difficult as a scientist, but I've got quite good at that and I almost enjoy saying I don't know now because it means that I'm going to shortly know.

Another challenge is my distributed team. I’ve had students in Delft, Strathclyde, and UCL, and I teach at Cambridge. I’d love to have everyone in one place for a Friday pub trip! But for now, the spread reflects where the expertise is. I'm looking forward to one day having everyone at least in the same country. That would be nice. We've had nearly everyone on a call together; my master's student at Delft's now finished her degree. The project's still ongoing with some other designs there, but we've managed to get a meeting with everyone in the UK on the same call, which has been quite nice.

You said that you spend a day down in London a week and two to three weeks every few months in Holland. But what is your day-to-day schedule like?

Every day is just completely different. I try to cluster meetings on certain days. About 70% of my time goes into meetings, interviews, and sessions with participants and clinicians. The rest involves long-term planning - thinking about clinical trials, regulation and deployment. 

I also write grant applications- some small for usability studies, others bigger. We recently secured funding from ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), which is this new government Funding Agency, to think about implementation of neurotechnologies in general, not just in the specific case of dementia. I still do some analysis, although it's fantastic having students that can take over from me on that because there are so many high-level moving parts, it's hard to be down at the minutiae of data analysis all the way up to the large scale thinking about what we are going to do next year.

I'm taking part in a couple of leadership courses at the moment run by UCL. There's one called the Collaborative Research Leadership programme, so every month I spend a day down in London with the other members of the group and that's about trying to make sure that research culture at UCL is collaborative at the heart and to try to ensure that we are training the younger generation of scientists to have better values of what good leadership and research culture looks like, then hopefully it will lead to just better culture across the board. It would just diffuse across.

And then a lot of conferences and meetings. Yesterday I gave a seminar to some policy makers. For example, someone in the Department of Health and Social Care was sitting in the audience, which was fantastic because then she said, “yeah, that's exactly what we're trying to do in the Department of Health and Social Care.” So, you know, it's really exciting that the more you just say yes to different opportunities, the more you can find yourself in completely new spheres of people and networks and opportunities that just make your research and your projects even better.

Yeah, I'm sure it makes it all feel more impactful to see that you're reaching different groups of people.

What are you currently trying to get better at in your job?

I’m actually trying to get better at saying no to opportunities. It’s that constant fear of FOMO (fear of missing out) that if you don't get involved in this project, it's going to be the one that takes off and you won't be part of it. And that's often not the case, and it just contributes to more stress in my life that I have more responsibilities and deadlines. 

But I think the other thing is to lean into my strengths a bit more. I think the further you get into your career, the more you know what you're good at and what you enjoy doing versus what you know needs to happen, but you're not particularly good at it, or you don't want to do it. It's important, especially in the line of research that I'm in; it is very mission led. It's very focused on a particular societal challenge and there's so much I could dedicate my entire life to, but I also have to remember that I have to take care of myself and make sure I'm still doing things that I like doing to keep the momentum going.  I want to direct my energy there and find others to complement the areas I’m less strong in. That means building the right team and getting the right funding to support them.

Do you think it's helped being able to hire people for specific skills that you don't feel you're as strong on to fill that gap in knowledge?

Absolutely. I think it's the thing I like the most about - well not just about research but about sports as well - but I love being part of a team where you have this collection of individuals that have their own skill sets and ways of thinking, but when you come together, you produce something that's so much better than the sum of your individual parts. I don't think it happens all the time. It's really hard to get a good team together and to be all in the same place. But you know that meeting of minds where someone that you hired, because they've had a certain set of professional experiences, says something in your team meeting and you think, “that's exactly why I hired you, because that's the type of thinking that I don't have, but I know that this project needs”. It's this idea that the whole point of building a team is wanting to constantly hire people that are better than you and to surround yourself with people that are better than you. That's definitely something I've come to champion because I can't do this all by myself.

It's great learning from people, whether they're above or below you in your career.

I completely agree - everyone’s got something to say.

What goals do you have for your career? Where do you see yourself in the next few years professionally?

Due to my research being so translational - between the boundaries of research, clinical practice, technology development, and entrepreneurship - I see myself continuing in that space and I'd love to have my own established research group in academia. At the same time, I'd also like to be able to contribute to the work of start-ups and companies in the space of technology development, whether that's a fractional executive or as a consultant.

Which female-identifying people in your life inspire you, both in neuroscience and beyond?

I do a lot of sailing in my spare time because I grew up in a sailing family. There was a woman called Tracy Edwards who put together the first all-female crew for the around the world race in a boat called Maiden. She had to face so much resistance, from mostly men, saying, “oh, women can't do that”. I just think that's a really cool story. And I always think about that when something's particularly tough; I think about how she achieved that and then I think, “yeah, OK, this is doable.”

Then in my personal life, I suppose I’m a very big fan of all female-identifying people I meet because there are still extra struggles that they face to be able to do what they're doing. Yet they still go on. There are people brave enough to say, “no, this isn't OK and I can't go on.” I think there's lots of different ways in which I'm inspired by people. I love hearing everyone's story because, like I said earlier, someone always has something to give and you can always learn from them.

I’ve seen instances when you have two people in an equally senior position, but viewed entirely differently by their colleagues. The female academic might be referred to as bossy or cutthroat, but the male academic likely won’t be (even if they might be more so). 

Do you think there are aspects of the science and academic industry that need to be improved or addressed, particularly in terms of how different minority groups face different issues? And have you experienced any bias yourself?

Of course. Academia and society in general have a long way to go towards being more equitable for all of the different groups that exist. It’s important to make sure that it's a level playing field, or a playing field that's levelled according to what people need. Particularly in academia, look at what has been happening in the US with Trump's action on EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) groups; it's hard to know whether or not society's moving in the right direction. I feel like you have to take the wins and keep fighting the losses. 

It's hard to know if you've, personally, been the subject of bias or discrimination. Did I not get that thing because I'm a woman or was it just bad luck? I think my personal take is that it's about throwing yourself into as many different opportunities as possible, and eventually some have got to come through. Also having the self-belief that, even if there is resistance around you, that if you keep fighting you can break through. That's easier said than done. I know that there are lots of people that have experienced bias and discrimination, that it just becomes a question of “well, what's the point if this is just my reality?” The way forward is that we keep communicating, talking and banding together. That's why groups such as WiNUK are so important because it gives us space for that conversation to happen with that shared experience and shared advice. Although it's hard for people to be open about their vulnerabilities, I think it's even more important now, perhaps than it's ever been. That, hopefully, will lead to change.

I think shared experiences are really important because it lets you know you’re not alone in your experiences!

Congratulations on your win at the WiNUK awards event. How did you feel to receive the postdoctoral researcher of the year award?

Well, firstly, thank you very much for the award. You sometimes have a sense that the work you're trying to do, all the messages you're trying to communicate, are good ones. But to have an external validation that that is the case, it just lights more fire under your. Hearing people say, “yeah, this is a good thing that you're doing. You have to keep doing it. And there are people watching you doing it”, it's just been a really nice piece of validation for the work.

There are lots of fantastic things that you have been involved in listed in your nomination. You’ve talked about a few of them already, but please could you discuss a few of the things that led to your win?

Well, I think science doesn't exist just in the office. It trickles into every part of society and the goal of science is to make society better. That means that it's not just about doing the research, it's about talking to people about your research. It's about writing blogs about why people should care about your research, why it's going to impact them. It's about bringing people together. That's why I loved organising that conference, Building Bridges in Medical Sciences, because it really was an opportunity to bring new people together that would never have met each other. I think that's also a theme in the entrepreneurship world, that it's all about networks of people and the meeting of minds that wouldn't have met before and opening new doors, broadening people's horizons, helping people think differently about something. What I love doing is helping people reach their full potential. You see that in teaching as well; I love teaching and mentoring students and colleagues.

I wish success for everyone in the way that I've managed to experience success and that's what leads me to volunteer so much of my time on these things.

And how do you think the award will shape your work moving forward? 

I hope it will shape how other scientists and funders view me - that I care about having a well-rounded approach to science. By having won an award through the many things that I'm doing, not just the one thing, it shows that you can be, not necessarily Jack of all trades, but you can have multiple professional focuses outside of the direct research you're doing and that can lead to success.

Sometimes I think success in science is really dominated by how many Nature or Science first author publications you have. But it should be dominated by, “how good are you at inspiring the next generation of scientists? How focused on research translation are you? How good are you at stimulating a really healthy research culture?” I think the award can go some way towards championing that.

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This interview was conducted by Rebecca Pope and edited by Neave Smith, with graphics produced by Georgie Savastano and Rebecca Pope. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.