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How To Give a Good Talk
Abstract
We depend on talks to communicate our work, and we spend much of our time as audience members in talks. However, few scientists are taught the well-established principles of giving good talks. Here, I describe how to prepare, present, and answer questions in a scientific talk. We will see how a talk prepared with a single premise and delivered with good eye contact is clear and enjoyable.
... Homework assignment 9 is designed to help students start their drafts of the final oral presentation by outlining the "single premise" for each slide, as discussed in [26]. This is consistent with the "assertion evidence" approach [23][24][25] mentioned in Lecture 7. Students are prompted with the following instructions: Starting from a blank PowerPoint file, include eight slides as an outline (no title slide or graphical transition slide yet). ...
... Bibliometrics, audiences, publication costs, and other issues in choosing a journal were discussed. Mensh and Kording's "Ten Simple Rules for Structuring Papers" in PLoS Computational Biology (Mensh and Kording, 2017) were introduced, leading to ideas for structuring striking research posters, and general principles for giving a good scientific talk following Alon's brief but highly targeted paper (Alon, 2009). Issues in scientific publication, including preprints, open access, double-blind review, and gender bias (Borsuk et al., 2009) were also briefly presented. ...
Bioinformatics is a highly interdisciplinary subject, with substantial and growing influence in health, environmental science and society, and is utilised by scientists from many diverse academic backgrounds. Education in bioinformatics therefore necessitates effective development of skills in interdisciplinary collaboration, communication, ethics, and critical analysis of research, in addition to practical and technical skills. Insights from bioinformatics training can additionally inform developing education in the tightly aligned and emerging disciplines of data science and artificial intelligence. Here, we describe the design, implementation, and review of a module in a UK MSc-level bioinformatics programme attempting to address these goals for diverse student cohorts. Reflecting the philosophy of the field and programme, the module content was designed either as “diversity-addressing”—working toward a common foundation of knowledge—or “diversity-exploiting”—where different student viewpoints and skills were harnessed to facilitate student research projects “greater than the sum of their parts.” For a universal introduction to technical concepts, we combined a mixed lecture/immediate computational practical approach, facilitated by virtual machines, creating an efficient technical learning environment praised in student feedback for building confidence among cohorts with diverse backgrounds. Interdisciplinary group research projects where diverse students worked on real research questions were supervised in tandem with interactive contact time covering transferable skills in collaboration and communication in diverse teams, research presentation, and ethics. Multi-faceted feedback and assessment provided a constructive alignment with real peer-reviewed bioinformatics research. We believe that the inclusion of these transferable, interdisciplinary, and critical concepts in a bioinformatics course can help produce rounded, experienced graduates, ready for the real world and with many future options in science and society. In addition, we hope to provide some ideas and resources to facilitate such inclusion.
... When I started my laboratory, I found a series of papers by Uri Alon to be of great help for choosing a scientific question, disseminating knowledge, and building a motivated team in research (Alon, 2009a(Alon, ,b, 2010. I encourage every researcher to read them and to use them as a source of new strategies in their research path. ...
Arkaitz Carracedo is a principal investigator at the Association for Cooperative Research in Biosciences (CIC bioGUNE) in Spain; his laboratory focuses on signaling and metabolic alterations in cancer. Arkaitz has investigated the regulation of fatty acid oxidation in cancer cells and how these changes could be manipulated therapeutically. We chatted with Arkaitz to find out about his career in science so far.
One of the important mechanisms in cancer cell metastasis is the cellular function of a specific cell type called myofibroblast cells. Myofibroblast cells are unique cell types that play an important role in the cancer cell microenvironment. As a step toward integrating the latest peer-reviewed cancer research findings into a general biology remote learning setting, we developed an innovative guest speaker talk to engage first-year undergraduates to develop a prediction on tumor microenvironment. In our article, we describe integrated remote approaches using Jamboard and reflective mentoring to validate and reflect on undergraduate team responses within an inclusive and equitable framework. These teaching and mentoring strategies provide a framework for senior undergraduates to be transformative role model scholars that inspire the next generation of Latinx and Native American undergraduates in important topics related to health and environment and the process of science for general biology undergraduates.
We believe that medical lectures can be improved by considering techniques from comedy. Foremost, lecturers should educate their audiences. This works well, if lecturers have fun and entertain. In preparing the presentation, they should develop a storyline, try to surprise their audience, prepare to employ unexpected objects and carry out several test runs. During the presentation, lecturers should dare to use self-irony, appeal to students' emotions, be factual and precise, serve the audience, keep it short and provide memorable opening and closing statements. Medical lectures should be both informative and entertaining.
The process of training new PhDs is complex and has significant dropout rates associated with loss of financial and time investments by the student, mentor, and program. One approach to improve graduate education is to make explicit the skills students need to develop and to put in place mechanisms to develop those skills.
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