Communicating science is as important as performing the research. With increasing multi-disciplinary collaborations in research, there is a need to present our work to scientists who are not experts in our field or to communicate our work to the general public. A typical presentation we prepare for our lab meeting or a departmental seminar would not suffice. One needs to add some extra flavor to reach those non-experts from the other departments, and sometimes, the general audience who don’t perform any research.
There are many platforms that discuss how to give a great scientific talk. Here, I share a few ideas on how to prepare a research presentation for a multi-disciplinary or a general audience.
Image: Ant-Man and The Wasp. Walt Disney Studios.
1) Define the audience.
One of the most important steps in preparing a presentation for a multi-disciplinary audience is to gauge their expertise level. In an inter-disciplinary event, this becomes obvious. A biologist will not expect a physicist to know the norms of their field. If presenting to a general audience, the assumption is that the audience will have no technical knowledge of your field (don’t dumb it down too much either). Look into the conference attendees and presentation lists to get an idea of the fields they come from, and tailor the introduction to your talk so that the audience can follow your science. In general, use of too many abbreviations in every slide might also lose the audience’s attention.
2) Provide the big picture.
Very frequently, we present our research to our own lab or our department, and it is easy to talk about technical terms that everyone in our lab understands. This isn’t true in a multi-disciplinary presentation. It is important to open the presentation with the purpose of your research, making sure the audience understand the big picture before getting lost in the details of that important research you've been working on for years. A biologist might study the importance of a specific set of proteins that regulate a gene or a chemist might study the influence of changing a bond in the chemical structure of a molecule. But what’s the point? Provide your audience the big picture of WHY you are doing the research. Give the audience enough reason to care about your research. This is even more important when you present to the general public; placing your research in a societal context or in the context of a particular application is key to hooking your audience.
3) First, concepts. Then the research.
Regardless of the time slot you are given, spend enough time in the beginning of your presentation to discuss concepts involved in your research, the background and motivation for it before going into technical aspects. And remember, presentations are not similar to how you would write a research paper. Condense the information and present only highlights of your work so the audience can follow, instead of going through every piece of detail you worked on.
4) Engage the audience.
The point of a scientific presentation is not only to share what you've done, but also to ensure that your audience "gets it". A thoroughly detailed technical presentation is not useful when presenting to a general audience. If it helps, you can imagine discussing your work with a family member or your friend who is in a completely different field. If you think they will not understand a particular slide in your talk, then it requires work. You can also use analogies to drive home your concepts. Pop-culture references, for example, have been shown to be useful tools in teaching STEM and to contextualize research in presentations and publications. Science is fun; scientific presentations should be, too.
5) Practice.
Presenting your work to a multi-disciplinary audience will help hone your speaking skills. With the onset of COVID, there has been a huge spike in the number of online seminar series that one can present in. This is especially useful for students and post-docs to practice presenting their research to peers from other fields (compared to one or two discipline-specific conferences per year if selected for a talk). Moreover, this is a great chance to connect to other scientists and non-scientists from around the world. As lab heads, the principal investigators could also stress the importance of (and guide their lab members in) creating presentations for a wider audience beyond the usual presentations to a thesis committee.
Have fun presenting!
A version of this article was written for the newsletter In the loop from The RNA Institute at SUNY Albany.