Some thoughts about slideshows

I know that there are a lot of good (and bad) tips out there about what a good Power Point Presentation is. I will merely mention the points that I think are simple to incorporate, while still having a big effect. Note that I am a scientist, so this list might or might not concern you, depending on your background and your goal of the presentation.

  1. Preparing the Presentation
    Each slide of your talk will take about one minute to present, maybe more, but surely not less. If your time frame is ten minutes, prepare a maximum of eight slides, including the title slide. If it is twenty minutes, prepare sixteen slides, and so on. Boil your contents down to the time frame that was given to you. It is plainly arrogant to think that you are actually important enough to use more time than allotted to you.
  2. The Title
    Make it short and memorable, and use common language. You want your audience to read and remember it.
  3. The Title Slide
    This will be the slide that is projected the second longest of them all. The chairman is introducing you, you will start with the introduction, and in these two to three minutes the audience looks at the title slide. Use that slide to prepare the audience for your talk: put a question up there, next to the title and your name. (If you come up with a short and good question, make it the title of your talk.) Or show the most important result together with a very short explanation. Make that slide meaningful.
  4. Acknowledgements
    You wouldn’t be standing there without your peers, so acknowledge them, and now is the time. That doesn’t mean you need to put their names in tiny writing on a slide. It is much stronger if you state their names by heart, without having them on a slide: this shows that you actually remember them.
  5. Insert here the top ten things to do in a presentation. This is extensively covered everywhere, so I’ll jump right to the end.
  6. The Last Slide
    Here is the slide that will be up on the wall the longest. To project a “Thank you!” or “Questions?” is a stupid way of wasting this slidetime. If you have put a question on your title slide, this is the time to put the question again, and the answer next to it. If you started with the graph showing your Take Home message, show that graph again and state the take home message. Or, if you have a nice conclusion slide, just leave that up as your last slide. You know you have a good last slide if it is simple, but you still can answer all the questions coming by pointing to some part of this slide.

Two Minutes Pitch for EuroTech Workshop in Lausanne: “Selling your Science”

The following manuscript is from a workshop about “Selling your Science” that I took in July 2015 at the EPFL. It is a two-minutes pitch I wrote before the workshop. The result (with quite a few adjustements due to the workshop) can be seen in a video right here.

I’m Dominik.

I’m working at the technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen, where I’m doing “Biophotonics”, which is, amongst other things, using light to diagnose and treat severe diseases, such as cancer or circulatory disorders.

Basically, I want to cure you by just looking at you.

On one hand, light is very well suited to this task, since it is normally not harmful to humans.

On the other hand, however, humans are not very transparent to light, and you need a lot of tricks to see inside or even through a human body.

I’m not going to bore you today with all the beautiful techniques people have come up with, but I am going to give you a glimpse at one of them, the one that is at the very bottom of them all: it is using light of high quality. Luckily, Theodore Maiman invented a source delivering such light more than half a century ago: the laser.

Today, it’s development is far from done. Since light is so fundamental to all aspects of Biophotonics, my group at the technical University of Denmark is working towards higher quality laser light sources, that have the additional benefit of being more compact and cheaper than their predecessors, and of being easier to operate.

Already now, we could show that, using our newly developed light sources, we can get a clearer view of the inside of a human body, basically by just looking at it from outside.

Your highest risk of death is from a circulatory disorder or from cancer. These two are also weighing most heavily on our society’s health costs.

My vision and responsibility as a researcher is that our light source, when used in Biophotonics, will lead to an earlier diagnosis and higher chances of curing these life-threatening diseases, to the benefit of our whole society.

Thank you very much.