How to acknowledge collaborators in a meaningful way

Almost every scientific presentation ends with a picture of the lab members. Some presenters go further and show pictures of other collaborators, donors, etc. Presenters seem to think this indicates a generosity of spirit.

Such slides accomplish little. The pictures are only visible for a short time and the audience is not paying attention. Even if the lab member is in the audience, they remain anonymous. They may get a fleeting moment of pride, but nothing more.

Instead, the speaker should ask the contributing lab members to stand up. This will allow the audience to see who contributed and it may lead to audience members engaging them; a valuable experience for postdocs and graduate students.

And by the way, there is nothing more frustrating than hearing a PI conclude a talk by saying that a certain post-doc did most of the work. WHY THEN ISN'T THAT POSTDOC GIVING THE TALK? The PI's should teach that postdoc to develop and deliver the talk. The PI's role is to train the postdoc; not to hog all the glory while treating trainees like human pipettes!

A to Z: Data gathering to presentation

The following figure gives a quick summary of the process from data gathering to presentation of results.

Experiments (data gathering research) in the laboratory generally produce mountains of data. A critical part of the presentation process (also part of the research process) is to take that mountain of data, figure out what is important and decisive, and understand the proper context for that data (context is symbolized by the layout of the pages on the grass). You cannot proceed to the presentation until you have figured out what small portion of your data is important and explanatory.

The key point is that a slide presentation is not a "data dump." It concisely summarizes the thematic lessons learned from the research.

Successful vs. Effective Presentations

The audience was getting restless. The job candidate had flipped through about 70-80 complicated slides in the first 45 minutes of their job talk. He then looked up and announced, "I'll have to speed up if I'm going to get through all my slides." Impressed by his thoroughness, the department made him an offer.

Increasingly, it is possible to achieve a degree of success in biomedical research despite an inability to effectively communicate scientific information. Audiences are increasingly satisfied with gaining only superficial understanding from a talk and massive volumes of data give the appearance of comprehensiveness. Leaders evaluating performance are themselves often creatures of the quantity over quality culture.

Talking faster to cope with time constraints may make the speaker feel good but it does nothing for the audience. Ditto for microscopic fonts or those slides with 8 or more graphs. Sadly, such speaking strategies are increasingly "adequate."

Three paradigm shifts are needed to move from successful to effective presentations:

1) Presentations must be designed for audience needs and they must be evaluated by what the audience learns, their increased ability to raise interesting questions, and to see the connections with their own research.

2) Presentations must be designed around a narrative showing. Only the data relevant to the narrative should be shown. We must move away from "data dump."

3) Presentations need to identify uncertainties, potential sources of error, and future strategies for closing these gaps.

An effective speaker will also be successful, but a successful speaker may not be effective in today's biomedical research culture.