Scientific soft skills workshops: Poster presentations

The opportunity to present your work as a poster at a meeting is an excellent introduction to interacting at international conferences. However, many scientists are not really aware, or do not know how to optimally design a visually effective poster that sells their key message.

A second aspect often overlooked is that the poster is only half the story; presenting the poster at a meeting is an essential element of promoting your research and yourself as an international scientist. Poster presentations allow you to interact one-on-one with people interested in your work, to establish contacts, and to hold interesting discussions about your work and the work of others.

The poster presentation workshop focuses on the design and content of the participants' own posters. We look at your posters and discuss elements that enhance dissemination of your key findings, such as where to place important information, how to make key points attract attention, planning attention getters, designing graphics, titles and subtitles, optimizing language and style, for example using lists and bullet points, and making the most of a poster session.

Poster presentation workshop topics

Deciding on content — less is better: your job is to provide the details at the poster session;

Optimizing layout — what goes where;

Essential elements — Abstract? Introduction? Outlook? Summary? References?

Creating effective visuals elements — clear and uncluttered to convey key information;

Creating effective titles, sub-titles, figure titles — key messages at a glance;

Language style — to be concise, precise and interesting;

List and bullet point structures — parallel grammatical constructions;

Being there — tips for presenting your poster and establishing contacts;

Interacting with the interested visitor — answering questions and conducting discussions;

Extra material — contact information, printouts, data stick?

Final goal — making a great impression!

Scientific soft skills workshops: Poster presentations

Poster presentation workshop topics

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