Scientific Presentations

Scientific Presentations

Guidelines that Chih-Horng Kuo (chk@gate.sinica.edu.tw) developed for our group members. Suggestions are welcome.
Related information:
- File Management
- Scientific Writing

General

Presenting your work, either through oral or poster presentations, provides excellent opportunities for you to think about your work critically, to examine the logic, to establish the context and a story line, and to prepare for writing. Also, such opportunities allow others to know your work and to provide feedback.
Lots (and lots) of preparation and practice are required to do this well. Do not get frustrated if you feel like you did not do well. Just note the points that you can improve the next time, and use that knowledge and experience to improve.
Critically important for many other career paths other than academic research.
Watch and learn: observe effective speakers at seminars or online talks. What do they do well?
Everyone improves with practice. Presentation skill is not talent—it is technique + preparation.

Critical questions

As the first step, answer these questions

Why?

Why are you doing this presentation?
- To tell the world what you have done
- To solicit feedback
- To compete for an award
- To get a job

Who?

Who are your audience?
- Homogeneous or heterogeneous?
- Background?
- How to make them interested?
- How to make them understand?

What and how

What are your goals for the presentation?
- What message do you want to deliver?
- What do you want the audience to remember?
How do you achieve these goal?

Examples

Progress report in the lab
- Introduction can be brief
- Need to explain detailed information regarding the Materials and Methods
- Need to show the raw data in Results
- Discussion focuses more on solving problems and have actionable future plans with clearly defined check points
Presentations at conferences
- Usually the opposite of lab meeting; not too much detail, emphasize on the “big picture”
- What kind of conference? Broadly defined fields or more focused?
- Among the potential audience, who do you care about the most? All the same, get as many people interested as possible? Already thinking about applying for graduate program or postdoc, and the potential future advisors will be there?
Presentation for the IPMB travel grant competition
- Who are the judges? What are their background? Is the breadth of your Introduction/Discussion appropriate?
Final presentation for the IPMB Internship Program
- For yourself and your advisor: how much do you understand the project? what have you learned through the internship?
- For other interns: exchange experience, learn from each other
- For judges: showcase your logic thinking and achievements. An award can be helpful for graduate school application.

Preparation

The “hourglass” principle in terms of the breadth
- Start from something broad enough for all target audience at the start of Introduction, then zoom in to focus on your key question at the end of Introduction.
- The Methods and Results sessions can be more focused on your field of study.
- For Discussion, provide a “big picture” as the context to highlight the importance and implication of the key findings. End by linking back to the start of Introduction. Did you deliver what you promised?
Do you truly understand all the information that you put in the slides or posters?
Design: aim for a clear and simple style
- True for oral and poster
- Your goal is to communicate clearly. Designs that emphasize more on personal styles or eye-catching effects are fine as long as those do not interfere with the main goal
- Are the text/figures/tables easy to read?
  - Common mistakes: the text of figure legend or axis labels are difficult to read

Rehearsal

Practice the presentation in your head silent is important, but is not enough
Talk out loud, ideally with a timer and standing up
Ask people to join if possible and request feedback
Emphasize the opening and ending.
- When you do well in the opening, you would be less nervous, and easier to do well for the main part.
- A good ending is often what people remembered after the presentation, also makes yourself feel good.

Oral presentations

Number of slides: plan to use one slide per minute as a general guideline.
- Get familiar with the pace, this also helps with time control.
- For short talks (~10 minutes), you may use a few more slides (but not too many)
- Vary the information density. Do not pack every slide with a lot of information
- For most slides, one key message per slide
Slide design
- Use figures effectively, avoid text-heavy slides
- Use large font size (for text and figure). If you show something on the slide, make sure that the audience can see it. Common bad examples are people show some very small figures or big tables with lots of info.
Think like a movie director
- How many minutes and how many slides do you have? Are the proportions for different parts (e.g., Introduction, Main Findings, Discussion) appropriate?
- Use a storyboard. Can be something very simple like hand sketch. Having a good idea about what you want to present before you actually work in front of computer can save a lot of time.
The “Outline” slide: mostly unnecessary, particularly for short presentations (< 30 minutes)
The “Acknowledgement” slide
- Can be the second slide (immediately after the title slide) or the last slide
The ending slide
- Common issue: end with a “Thank You!” slide, which does not contain any useful information.
- A better strategy: at the end of the presentation, while waiting for questions, keep the “Conclusions” slides on the screen. This helps to audience to remember the main points.
On stage: engage with your audience!
- Be confident and show the confidence to your audience
- Show enthusiasm! If the speaker appears to be not so interested, how can you expect the audience to become interested?
- Face the audience, keep eye contact
- Voice: change the speed, tone, and volume according to the content. For example: slow down for the important or complex part, louder for the exciting part.
- If no microphone is available, make sure to project your voice to the entire room
- Be careful with the pointer. Use the pointer to help the audience, not to distract them.
Q&A
- If the questions are unclear, request to repeat or ask in another way. Make sure that you truly understand the question before answering.
- If you cannot answer, be frank about it. However, if possible, provide some reasonable discussion.
- Be concise, but not overly so.

Poster presentations

Double-check the dimension guidelines!
Can people understand the key points by browsing without your presence?
Are the text, figures, labels within figures big enough?
Prepare a short (~1-3 minutes) and a long (~5-7 minutes) version of oral presentation based on the poster
Add a QR code? (to your paper or website)

Table of Contents

Scientific Presentations

General

Critical questions

Why?

Who?

What and how

Examples

Preparation

Rehearsal

Oral presentations

Poster presentations