Search results for: Giving presentations
Assertive Slide Titles to Guide Your Presentation
When I first learned how to design scientific presentations, I kept hearing the same advice from well-intentioned mentors: “Make sure your presentation tells a story!” they’d say. I understood what they meant in principle, but I had difficulty implementing this advice in my own presentations. In this article, I’m going to share a simple way…
Read More15 Top Tips to Giving a Great Talk
I still remember the first time I stood in front of a crowd of about 35 people, including my brand new lab mates and professors, in my first ever lab meeting. My feet were as wobbly as ever and all I wanted was a big boulder to hide behind, so my crazy shaky legs would…
Read More Banish Those Insecurities: Tips on Giving Scientific Talks
Every once in a while you are forced to abandon your comfort zone. You have to leave behind your comfortable territory of the lab bench or your desk in the reading room and stand up in front of a group of people. Then, you will be expected to deliver – the department seminar, a progress…
Read More Alternatives to presenting your science with Powerpoint
I was shocked recently at a seminar called “Writing with style” by the Manchester University writer-in-residence, Chris Simms. He opened by saying that he has never done a presentation using Powerpoint in his life. What? Surely biologists and PowerPoint presentations (PPT) go together like biologists and white lab coats. They teach you to make PPTs…
Read More Talking When Terrified: Tips for a Nervous Presenter
When I was in school, I absolutely hated giving talks. I was a really nervous presenter, my heart would start beating faster, my face would go red, my hands would shake…even my voice would tremble! Since then I’ve made some big breakthroughs, and now I absolutely love giving talks and lectures. Here are my top…
Read More 10 Ideas for Researchers Working from Home
Working from home but don’t have a garage lab? We’ve got 10 ideas to keep you productive while you’re working away from the bench.
Read More 10 Tips on Writing a Research Poster
Poster presentations are a great way to show off your hard work, especially if you are just starting out in research. They are much less stressful than oral presentations, but still provide great networking opportunities and valuable practice at talking about your work. Tips for Scientific Poster Presentations Choose your content wisely. The information you…
Read More How to Give an Incredible Scientific Talk
Committee meeting approaching? 10 minute department seminar? Lab meeting? Fear not! My adviser has insulted my presentations so regularly, that I’ve finally learned some things. Hopefully, I can head your adviser off at the pass, and give you some tips on crafting an incredible talk. What’s the Occasion? Who’s Your Audience? This is arguably the most important…
Read More 5 Top Tips for Surviving Your First Conference
One of the really exciting parts of being involved in research is the opportunity to travel to a conference (hopefully at an exotic location!) to present your work and get to see presentations from the major players in your chosen field. Now you’ll probably have all sorts of frivolous reasons for not wanting to go…
Read More How to Have a Successful Lab Outreach Program
Lab outreach programs are one of the ways that science reaches out to its future generations and entices them to join the ranks of those who have pledged allegiance to the pursuit of the unknown. Successfully running these programs for young adolescents depends on a certain number of factors, such as the ability to capture…
Read More How to Share Your Lab Protocols and Why It Benefits You
Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific research and your results need to be reproducible not only by yourself but also by others, both in and outside of your laboratory. This reproducibility is key for validation of your results as well as to further expand on the knowledge gained during the experiment. In order to accurately…
Read More How to Choose the Right PhD Lab
Have you read an article How To Start Your PhD The Right Way? If you have, then you may have already decided that you are going to do a PhD. The next step is to choose your supervisor – this is a very important decision to make. When I chose my supervisor, I had only…
Read More The Art and Science of Figure Creation: Think BIG to see Small
There are those of us who began our careers literally in the dark. Yes, there was a time and not that long ago, that all figures had to be on film. Slide presentations were slides. Micrographs were, well, micrographs on film. Figure creation involved several steps: figures for publications had to be mocked up; then…
Read More The Art of Bridging the Gap between Scientists and the Public
Communicating your science to a lay audience is different than giving a talk to other scientists. An urban legend says that when Michael Faraday verified the relationship between electricity and magnetism, he was asked to present his evidence to the prime minister of England. So, he had his coils arranged and he just moved a…
Read More What’s The Problem With Ampicillin Selection?
Ever wonder what those small colonies, like satellites, surrounding a larger E. coli colony on your LB with ampicillin plates were? Or why, when you picked that colony, it never had the plasmid you just transformed? Well, it’s because those satellite colonies are “protected” from the ampicillin by the big colony. Read on for more… Ampicillin…
Read More Optimize Bacterial Protein Expression by Considering these 4 Variables
So, you have successfully cloned your gene of interest and are eager to purify buckets of protein. No matter your eventual application—kinetic experiments using a SPR instrument, structural analysis using X-ray crystallography, or any other experiment—you’ll need to express your protein first. Now, it’s time to put your expression plasmid into E. coli and get…
Read More The Establishment of the Nobel Prize
Let’s play a game. I’ll say a word and you say what comes to your mind. Ready? Go! Cat… Kitchen… Doctor… Airplane… Nobel… I have no idea what you said when I said cat but I’d say most of you said “prize” when I said Nobel. Alfred Nobel’s name is most often remembered because of…
Read More Troubleshooting and Optimizing your Mouse Breedings
Anyone working with laboratory animals has probably realized that simply putting two animals together does not always yield new offspring and reliable continuity of the animal line – unfortunately animal husbandry isn’t that simple! Of course, apart from making sure that the two animals put together are from different genders, there are a lot of…
Read More Making Sense of Creative Commons Licenses
As a scientist, you have many options when it comes to licensing your original, scholarly work. For every new paper, data set, video/audio recording, image collection, figure, or computer program (just to name a few), you must decide how far and wide the material will be distributed and what others are allowed to do with…
Read More Fluorescent Tyramides In Histology: A Versatile Approach For Multiplex Molecular Tissue Probing.
If you are a researcher who is using fluorescent staining on your cells and tissue sections, you should seriously consider using tyramide reagents. Why? Well, because they can have exquisite sensitivity, are easy to use, versatile and there is an increasing range of fluorophores in the pipeline. As they rely on a peroxidase catalysed visualization…
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