I'm working on a nice guide to giving effective science talks. Please feel free to throw in any suggestions you might have that I should include.

Cheers!

Ummm....

-Always introduce your abbreviations. For instance, if you are going to talk about Embryonic Stem Cells, let the audience know that 'ESC' is embyonic stem cell.

There seems to be a trend among seasoned speakers (i.e. PIs) to include some totally irrelevant pictures of every day stuff to demonstrate your point. i.e. star wars pics to talk about activated lymphocytes, etc. Has anyone else noticed this?

:D Treg

There seems to be a trend among seasoned speakers (i.e. PIs) to include some totally irrelevant pictures of every day stuff to demonstrate your point. i.e. star wars pics to talk about activated lymphocytes, etc. Has anyone else noticed this?

:D Treg
It's not just the PIs. :cool:

There seems to be a trend among seasoned speakers (i.e. PIs) to include some totally irrelevant pictures of every day stuff to demonstrate your point. i.e. star wars pics to talk about activated lymphocytes, etc. Has anyone else noticed this?

:D Treg


I noticed this especially with pediatricians; they like to show pictures of their kids/vacations. Nobel prize winners also like to show unusual pictures as well; I heard rumors that the guy who came up with PCR used to show pornographic pictures at some conferences, but I never saw it for myself...

Don't have ANYTHING on a slide you don't explain or talk about. Don't make slides full of text and read them out loud. (Personally, I think slides should have little or no text, and I've observed that the more senior/competent people are the less text they have on their slides, but that's just in my experience.)

Don't make slides full of text and read them out loud.

Agreed with this one. Thats just annoying.

- Choose good colors for your presentation background/text. Be conscientious that some people are color blind, and can't distinguish reds/greens, etc. Yellow is a sucky color for graphs in general.

- Use tasteful animation in your powerpoint slides.

- Have an idea of your audience. In one of the worst sessions I ever attended at a conference, 5/5 of the speakers spent the first 5 min (of their 15 min talk) presenting the same background slide on leukocyte rolling. If you are speaker #5 in that situation, please skip that slide or gloss over it.

- Be prepared with extra slides showing info that you might not have presented, but might be asked about.

- Know the relevant literature. You will likely get questions, particularly, I have found, if you are presenting a poster, that have to do with some guys particular interest in the topic. Its helpful if you know what they are talking about beforehand.

Other suggestions about attending scientific conferences in general...

- Seek out PIs from other institutions that are doing similar work to you, and check out the posters from their students. It helps when submitting manuscripts. I lucked out in that about a month before my paper was submitted, I had spoken in detail about my research with both the editor of the journal we were submitting to, and also, it turned out, one of my reviewers. I think that helped my paper move along quicker.

- Seek out PIs from other institutions that are doing similar work to you, and check out the posters from their students. It helps when submitting manuscripts. I lucked out in that about a month before my paper was submitted, I had spoken in detail about my research with both the editor of the journal we were submitting to, and also, it turned out, one of my reviewers. I think that helped my paper move along quicker.

Interesting!

An interesting and very effective method (if done correctly) is to draw the slides.

This is an example of an excellent scientific presentation:

The Oyster and the Quantum (http://netlib.bell-labs.com/who/cafuchs/Oyster.ppt#1)

Brilliant!

Hehe, I liked some of the titles: "Bohring Bayesians?" LOL.

Also, the history of the world was great.

where the heck did this come from?!

Only in physics...awesome.

I came across this as a physics ug major. It is from Christopher Fuchs (PhD, UNM). Really interesting guy, with great research applications. Works for Bell labs now. This was one of those, "See, physicists can do interesting things" presentations. If quantum information theory is your cup of tea, check out these:

A. Furusawa, J. L. S?rensen, S. L. Braunstein, C. A. Fuchs, H. J. Kimble, and E. S. Polzik, ?Unconditional Quantum Teleportation,? Science 282(5389), 706?709 (1998). [This article was listed in Science as one of the top ten ?breakthroughs of the year? in 1998; see Science 282(5397), 2156?2161 (1998).]

C. A. Fuchs, N. Gisin, R. B. Gri?ths, C.-S. Niu, and A. Peres, ?Optimal Eavesdropping in Quantum Cryptography. I. Information Bound and Optimal Strategy,? Physical Review A 56(2), 1163?1172 (1997).

Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, not too many biomedical type applications, yet.