Female scientists give fewer colloquium talks than do their male counterparts, finds a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Tag Archives: presentation
Successful vs. effective research presentations
In a disturbing trend, biomedical researchers can achieve a degree of career success despite an inability to effectively communicate scientific information, say David Rubenson and Paul Salvaterra.
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
– Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, 1657
It goes without saying that every biomedical researcher wants to give effective presentations. Or does it? Is a presentation effective if it merely wows the audience with dense data, causes minimal objections, but fails to convey true scientific understanding? While such presentations may provide a degree of career success, they rarely inspire systematic or creative thinking. Scientists are wasting significant time listening to presentations that fail to effectively communicate information.
Scientific presentations: A cheat sheet
Scientific culture and insufficient training in public speaking leads to dull, text-heavy talks. Put more effort into presentations, say Andrew Gaudet and Laura Fonken
As postdocs with a combined 20 years of experience in neuroscience research, we’ve attended hundreds of talks and delivered dozens of presentations. We’ve realized it is imperative to perform your best every time you present — whether at a weekly meeting or at a job interview.
Your preparation and organization will help the audience understand your main points, and this professionalism will boost your reputation, which could lead to further opportunities. Ultimately, a presentation is one of the ways of influencing how others perceive your science and your competence. Here, we’ve put together some ideas for creating polished presentations.
The competition that likes to say YES!
Enterprising early career researchers get some high-level mentoring to handle the rough and tumble of the boardroom. David Payne meets finalists in the 21st annual Young Entrepreneurs Scheme (YES)
Epitome is a Singapore biotech start-up whose product pipeline is based on engineered tail proteins to tackle bacterial diseases. It wants a slice of the US’s $6bn acne market. Epitome’s founders are seeking raise $10m to build a factory where its cosmetic products can be manufactured. Investors will be rewarded with a seat on its board.
The launch team describe the company at a presentation attended by other young entrepreneurs. They brace themselves for some tough questions from a judging panel. One judge asks how a factory can be built for $10m Another challenges the team’s plan to launch an acne treatment as a cosmetic product, which means they won’t mention acne on the label (the team adopted this approach to make the US regulatory process more straightforward).
Elena Lurieluke, Head of Global Life Sciences Open Innovation, Corporate R&D at P&G, addresses fellow YES judges and finalists.
Science communication: Lessons from improvisation
Reply
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