Improvisation techniques can help scientists hone their key messages when addressing peers at conferences, says Catherine Seed.

Guest contributor Catherine Seed

Robert Langer presenting at the 2015 Boston Naturejobs Career Expo{credit}Naturejobs{/credit}

You’ve spent weeks in the lab collecting, processing and analysing your data, and you’ve filed for publication. All this work took a lot of effort, time, organisation and collaboration (and coffee). Finally, you are now free to show the data to the world at the next conference (or most probably to your research group).

This step might seem like the easiest part. Once you know the results, you can share them. Talk about them until the cows come home. After all, you’ve just spent years working on them. You know them better than anyone else.  Yet it seems impossible to cram all you know – the intricacies of your study, the broader context, the unexpected results, the side-projects, how the variables link together – into a 15 minute talk at a conference! Which points should you make, and with what detail? And how? How is a presentation structured again? Continue reading →