Engage, Inform, Inspire – Bring Your Natural and Life Science Talk to the Next Level

Aims

Create and deliver impactful presentations.

Content

Distilling complex ideas into simple images and messages is, despite being challenging, crucial for all professionals to be able to present their work efficiently. This 2-day intensive workshop will help participants to improve their presentation skills, from design to delivery, for application beyond the group-meeting setting.

Before the first day of the workshop, participants are required to read the articles and watch the videos given by the workshop leader. The first day of the workshop will then begin with each participant giving a brief 5-minute presentation of their work for the other workshop participants. The rest of the first day will then consequently focus on the preparation of a talk, following a simple and efficient workflow based on storytelling principles and including the creation of engaging visuals. The second day of the workshop will then focus on the execution of the talk. How to project competence and confidence? How to engage an audience with both voice and body language? The workshop will close with the participants presenting their revised talk in front of the camera again. Participants will receive feedback from the trainer and from their audience throughout the workshop. After the second workshop day, participants will have one week to write a report on their experience presenting on the second day (e.g. how they implemented what they learned, what worked, what didn’t work), as well as on their plan moving forward (i.e. what do they intend to work on in their future talks and presentations).

At the end of the training, participants will know the principles of storytelling, the best practices of slide design, and will know how to align their verbal and body languages to reliably engage an audience.

Methods

This workshop is a combination of theory and practice, providing both the why and the how to structure and deliver an impactful scientific presentation. For each section (storytelling, slides, delivery) practical exercises allow participants to learn hands-on to structure and deliver their own content. During the second day of the workshop, participants will evaluate each other, learn to give feedback and thus acquire the ability to learn from observation. Moreover, participants will have literature to read and watch, and a report to write.

Material to bring:
- a 5-min presentation about your work for your fellow students, using slides, and send these to the trainer the weekend before the first day of the workshop the latest.

Target Group

All doctoral Candidates of the Faculty of Science

About the Trainer

Dr Samuel Lagier is a public speaking trainer and coach. He founded and manages SamSpeaksScience.com whose mission is to help experts talk about their knowledge. He runs workshops in Swiss higher education institutions and coaches researchers interviewing for Swiss and European grants. Sam coached, curated and hosted the TEDxLausanne conference for 7 years. He is a member of the science-entertainment collective The Catalyst and the improvised comedy troupe the Renegade Saints, with whom he taught improvisation and runs seriously fun workshops for non-profits and corporate clients.
In his scientific career Samuel studied sensory perception in the normal and schizophrenic brains in France, the US and in Switzerland.

Workload

Preparatory work: 10h
Course attendance: 2 x 8h
Writen report: 4h

Feature

This course is reserved for doctoral candidates of the Faculy of Science.

Once registration is open, applications will be collected for 24 hours and course places allocated by lot. All registrations received after the initial 24h period will be put on a waiting list and assigned on a first come, first served basis.

Course places/places on the waiting list will be confirmed by e-mail. Course registrations can only be canceled before the registration period ends (send an e-mail to grace@unibas.ch). Full course attendance is mandatory. Participants who fail to attend a course without prior notification or withdraw after the registration deadline are subject to a fee of CHF 30. In addition, participants who cancel their course registration at a later point in time, are absent without an excuse or do not attend the entire course will, for reasons of fairness, not be considered for course registration in the following semester and will be removed from other courses offered in the same semester. Please find the detailed regulations on the Transferable Skills Homepage.