During this one-day workshop, participants get to explore every aspect of a presentation (scientific storytelling, slide design and slide use, presenting with confidence). Each participant gets to implement what they’ve learned on their own work with a large array of exercises. In this workshop format, participants do not give formal presentations in front of their peers.

This workshop is limited to 16 participants.

This workshop opens with each participant giving a formal 3- to 5-minute presentation of their research. The rest of the first day is dedicated to scientific storytelling, slide design and slide use. Whenever possible, we allow a 10-day interval between the two days of the workshop. On the second day, participants work on facing and interacting with an audience and presenting with confidence. The workshop concludes with each participant presenting their revised talks. Each presentation is followed by individual feedback from the trainer. These final presentations are also used to train the participants to analyse each other’s talks.

This workshop is limited to 12 participants.

This four-week course consists of four parts:

- An online synchronous opening session (1h)

- 12 videos for the participants to watch in their own time, exercises for them to put the content into practice on their own material and quiz questions to reinforce the learning.

- One-on-one online sessions with one of the trainers. These 30-minute sessions provide an opportunity for the participants to ask outstanding questions and to get feedback on their exercises.

- An in-person or online session during which the participants give a formal presentation in front of an audience and get individualised feedback from one of the trainers. Participants are split into groups of six (or less).

There is no limit on the number of participants for this course.

When it comes to presenting research, being a good researcher is not enough. In order to make a point and convince an audience, one needs to be a good speaker. But how to inspire an audience? How to engage and guide listeners rather than merely recite results and conclusions? How to inspire trust while facing stress-induced self doubt? This workshop will help participants to develop their stagecraft to be able to successfully engage and guide an audience.

With practical exercises, participants will work on their voice and body language. Together, we will review how to manage space and how to present with slides. Participants will learn how to best use presenting tools (clicker, pointer, microphones) and improve their stress management.

We humans are storytelling animals. We have evolved with and through stories, sharing vital information about food sources and dangers but also morality and values, thereby bringing communities together. In this information age, can the ancestral art of storytelling help researchers to better communicate their work?
In this workshop, participants will learn to apply the canonical storytelling elements to their research with the objective of enhancing their research communication in a variety of contexts, from public engagement events to job and grant interviews. The relative relevance of different storytelling elements for different media (talks, podcasts, videos, written articles) will be discussed, as well as the limitations of storytelling applied to the communication of academic knowledge.

Slides can be necessary to make a convincing technical point in front of an audience. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? But even if slides are commonplace in academic presentations, that doesn’t mean that they are used well. In fact, way too often, visuals are poorly designed to the point of becoming a hindrance rather than a help for the audience.

In this workshop, we’ll first review what slides are useful for. Then we’ll see how to interact with slides when delivering a talk and finally we’ll look into fundamental principles of slide design.

At the end of this workshop, participants will know how to design effective slides and how to use slides during a talk in order to guide their audience effectively.

Metaphors are more than sophisticated poetic embellishments – they shape our everyday lives in the way we speak, understand and act. A metaphor is a gateway between a known concept and a new dimension: it is this collision between disparate ideas that can transform confusion into comprehension. By looking at a complex problem or a new concept from unexpected angles and with different lenses metaphors help researchers to grasp the different facets of the challenge at hand. With this multi-facetted representation in mind, explaining the complexity of an idea becomes a lot easier.

While metaphors are essential elements of the research communication toolbox, they are always imperfect (“all metaphors leak”). Knowing a metaphor’s limitations is necessary to prevent the audience from being misled.

In this workshop, participants will explore the power of metaphors for understanding and explaining complex ideas. Fun and playful exercises will act as an introduction to translational thinking and we will then create metaphors to represent, explain, and understand the research topics related to the participants research.

Because research is a collaborative endeavour, conducted within and across research teams,  the research output is affected by team dynamics. What are the factors contributing to the complexity and evolution of the behaviour of a group of colleagues and collaborators? What is the best way to navigate the dynamics of a collective to achieve one’s own goals? What elements of team dynamics are key to successfully leading a research group?

In this highly dynamic (!) and interactive workshop, participants will experience different aspects of team dynamics through a series of situation-based activities. Each activity will be followed by a reflection and a discussion for each participant to make connections with their own professional experience and thus anchor their learnings.

Research and improvised comedy (improv) have a lot in common: they are explorations of the unknown that require intuition and creativity. How can improv be used to train research skills? The workshop will start with a prerequisite to explore the unknown and its inherent uncertainty, namely the creation of a supportive, safe and respectful environment. With that mindset, participants will test their adaptability, boost their creativity and practice co-creation through a series of playful exercices. At the end of the workshop, participants will be better equipped to face the unknown, they will make space for their own creativity, they’ll be better team players and they’ll be more confident in front of an audience.

Creativity is thought to be associated with the arts, less so with research. Academic knowledge is perceived as rigorous, rational and methodical. The research process is by nature very methodical: an experiment (or observation) is designed to test a hypothesis ; the hypothesis gets validated (or not) based on the results of the experiment. Some would argue that this process indeed does not leave much room for creativity. Yet where does the hypothesis come from in the first place? How to make sense of data that don’t fit the initial hypothesis? How to assemble the pieces of a research puzzle to write a coherent research article?

Researchers do need a great deal of mental agility, a capacity to navigate complex ideas and the ability to view things from multiple perspectives in order to succeed. In other words, a researcher’s creativity is an integral part of their work. Where does creativity come from? Can creativity be fostered?

This workshop will start with a discussion on the nature of creativity and the role of intuition in research. Participants will then engage in a series of playful and creative activities to better assess their abilities, gain confidence and understand what promotes and hinders their own creativity.