Anna Temp (BSc Psychology)

I studied at Buckingham from 2010-2012, obtaining a BSc Psychology First class and winning the Horlogerie Kandahar Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement. This enabled me to enroll at the University of Edinburgh, a Russell Group member and then ranked number 17 in the world. At Edinburgh, I completed my MSc Human Cognitive Neuropsychology. Buckingham’s psychology training is heavily focused on the practical aspects of research. Because we conducted over a dozen research projects as part of our on-going coursework, I was fully prepared not just for my First-class undergraduate thesis at Buckingham but also for my postgraduate thesis with Distinction at Edinburgh. I acquired competencies in academic writing, research design and statistical analysis at Buckingham that gave me confidence in my own research, which is rarely found at other universities.

My shining research skills qualified me for a PhD at Edinburgh, supervised by Dr Thomas Bak and Dr Billy Lee. My PhD involved a 12-month longitudinal data collection on Svalbard, just shy of the North Pole. One of my conference talks won the Springer Student Prize at the University of the Arctic Congress, 2016, and my PhD was recognized with the Moray Endowment Scholarship of ₤2000. I was even interviewed on BBC4 radio! My research training at Buckingham surely fueled my academic research success so that now, one year after my PhD graduation, I am working at one of Germany’s most prestigious research institutions. I am a clinical neuropsychology researcher specializing in rare disorders (think motor neuron disease) at the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) within the Helmholtz Association. With an annual budget around ₤3.5bn, the Helmholtz Association is listed as number 7 of the top 10 global research institutions by Nature Index. Meanwhile, DZNE is Germany’s Centre of Excellence in the EU’s Joint Programme for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, and according to a recent Forbes list, number 9 in the world for Alzheimer’s Disease research. DZNE is only 10 years old, so this is an impressive feat. I am proud of my Buckingham training, and of the job that I am doing here.