Who is this symposium for anyway?

Yesterday I attended a cancer research symposium at a major medical school. There were about 100 scientists in attendance; probably 85-90 young scientists (post docs, graduate students, etc.) and about 10-15 senior faculty. 85-90% of the questions and interactions came from those 10-15 senior faculty. Certainly some of this was shyness, but the opacity of the talks also contributed. Only scientists who had followed these fields for a long time could follow the talks. The speakers made no effort to tailor the talk to the bulk of the audience.

Not only is this a comment on presentation quality, it is also a comment on the lack of planning and foresight typical of many biomedical research symposia. Did the conference planners expect that most of the attendees would be young scientists? Is that what they wanted to happen? If so, did they inform the speakers? If so, did the speakers tailor their talks to the expected audience? Probably none of this occurred.

Now getting young scientists to speak up when more senior scientists are in the room is a tough problem, but if young scientists are the audience, leaders need to work on this problem. Otherwise why have a conference if it doesn't meet the needs of the audience? Beside, if you can "break the ice" early, virtually everyone will feel more comfortable and engaged. How about demanding senior faculty attend the poster sessions and pose questions to the young scientists? How about having a series of 5 minute "blitz briefings"by the young scientists, getting as many on the stage as possible.? How about breakout sessions where young scientists are pre-assigned major roles?

There may be many better ideas, but the key point when planning a conference is to figure out who it is for and then structure the conference to best inform that audience. This may take some additional work and some creativity, but without making that investment, we are wasting a lost of time for a lot of people.

Just shut down that second screen!

Increasingly conference rooms are being built with two screens, one oriented toward the left and one toward the right. I'm not talking about large conference halls, I'm talking about classroom size rooms. In the new stem cell building at Stanford there were two high definition plasma screens on the front wall of a moderately sized conference room. Their picture was sharp, but too small for the audience tor had easily. Eventually we had to replace them with a more traditional projector illuminating one large central screen.

But the major reason to work with only one screen is that the pointer is a critical element of a presentation. It connects the presenter's words with the visual signal coming from the slide. You don't want the audience looking at a screen without the pointer. So tell everyone to sit on one side of the room and only use one screen.

One nice feature for large conference halls is technology that allows a digital pointer arrow, operated from a laptop, to simultaneously illuminate all the screens. For room designers, this is a critical technology if you want to have more than one screen.

Sadly, this is way too typical

Today I attended a major cancer center's weekly seminar. I had never visited this center, so I was looking forward to getting a sense of the culture, even if I couldn't understand all the material related to imaging agents in glioblastoma.

What I witnessed was unfortunately, not uncommon in biomedical research. I don't mean to pick on this center, or this speaker, it's what I've seen throughout my career and at many institutions.

Although this was the regular weekly center-sponsored talk, only about 30-35 people attended. More striking was the audience composition, which based on looking at the ages, I guess only 2 or 3 faculty attended. The rest were probably graduate students and postdocs. Rare is the Cancer Center that really does pull faculty together (they do however look interactive in written grant proposals!).

The presentation was also pretty typical; about 50-75 very complicated slides in 50 minutes, a thematic question buried somewhere in the talk, and little evidence that the speaker was concerned about what audience was comprehending or whether they were even listening. Had the speaker taken a look, he would have seen audience members furiously doing emails, surfing the web. A few were dozing

After the 50 minutes, ~75 slides, AND ZERO audience interaction , the remaining faculty member (the Center Director crept out early) asked the audience if there were any questions. There were none and about two thirds of the room starting emptying. Feeling a bit sheepish, the remaining faculty member posed a question as people continued to file out.

Again no particular criticism on this Center or this speaker. It's way too typical. We need to rethink how we communicate science.