Tag: Science

Meaning in Learning and in Communicating Science to the Public

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I joined the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s Science Education Partners/Virtual Scientist in a Classroom (book me to speak with your classroom, if you want!) this winter, which means I’m spending three hours every Friday for a month learning how to communicate about science to 6th through 9th graders and therefore to everyone—in part because I want to feel like a Harvard student and do more things at Harvard before I graduate and in part because I want to improve my out-loud science communication and I miss teaching.

One of the exercises we did on the first day was to list out activities from our childhood that qualified as “a memorable learning experience that took place in an informal environment (meaning outside of school).” Here are mine:

  • Coding (in HTML) fan sites for my favorite band at the time, t.A.T.u. These were very embarrassing and you will never ever see them, and maybe you don’t consider HTML to be coding, but these fan sites were my first ever exposure to any sort of code. This was at El Valor in Chicago.
  • Coding my theme for MySpace, which would have been a few years later. I think this was a first coding experience for a lot of people in my generation. It must have been HTML with a little bit of JavaScript and some CSS. This is where I learned how to google anything and everything I wanted to learn to code—probably the most important skill.
  • Setting up a shop and pricing products in NeoPets—my first exposure to economics of any sort. (I’m not particularly good at economics.) Apparently there was also a stock market (a few of my friends learned about the stock market through NeoPets) but I missed that; I was more interested in the very small moneys of buying up snowballs at one neopoint and reselling them for three neopoints.
  • Reading fiction, which is both escapism and (I think) the best way to learn how to write. I’m bilingual so I learned to read a little late but I read a lot as a kid, a novel a day for a long while.
  • Reading popular science magazines, which for me was first Popular Science and then MIT Technology Review (it is not lost on me that it is absolutely nuts that I now occasionally write for TR; younger me would be beyond the moon). Since both of my parents are biologists my first exposures to science were of course through them; after that it was Popular Science, and Popular Science was also an introduction to science more broadly.
  • DeviantArt. I was obsessed with photography, especially macro photography, and I learned a lot about what makes a photo meaningful to me by looking at other people’s photos. Some people also posted about their process. And of course I learned a lot from posting my own art and getting feedback.

These experiences were meaningful to me because while they were fun they were also some of the times I learned the most. I was learning because I wanted to do something with the information, which is when I learn best.

It surprised me, listing these out, that all of them were in some way social. Fan sites for bands, MySpace, DeviantArt, and NeoPets are all directly social. Reading fiction and popular science magazines is also social, in a different way—absorbing other people’s voices and ideas and thinking about what I would say if I were part of the conversation. I like group work now—specifically I like groupwork at work, which is most of my job—but in school I most enjoyed work where I holed up on my own and did practice problems or wrote essays. I did not like lecture and I really did not like groupwork, especially in-class groupwork. So it’s surprising to me that my best and most memorable learning all involved other people, even if at a distance.

Next we talked with an actual 8th-grade science class. We went around the room introducing ourselves and our work and then we answered questions from the class. I was appallingly terrible at this part. I said I study how vaccines affect infection by and transmission of COVID-19, which is true but resulted in a lot of questions about vaccines—how they work, how they’re designed—which is interesting but not what I study. What I should have said was that and something about the process: that most of what I do is code at my computer and talk with other people about my ideas and their ideas, that we use the mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome to trace transmission events, and that we work with the Department of Public Health to connect what we learn from the genomes to real-world data about the actual people infected and learn more than we could from either data source alone.

I want to mention that I was very impressed by the 8th graders. They asked excellent questions and already spoke enough of the language of biology to have a conversation in it. In retrospect I think I was there too by 8th grade; it shouldn’t have surprised me.

After meeting with the 8th graders we talked about the differences between how we communicate about science with the public vs. with other scientists. The most important difference is not the language, which is what I had been focusing on, but that the order of things is inverted: in science we communicate

  1. the necessary background,
  2. then supporting details,
  3. then our results and conclusions;

when we communicate with the public we should be presenting

  1. the bottom line,
  2. then the so-what/why it matters,
  3. and only then the supporting details.

I think we’re pretty good at the supporting details, maybe even the bottom line; the so-what is more difficult. We listed out answers to the question, “Why is my work important?” Here’s what I came up with (I have very high opinions of the importance of my work):

  • It can show how a disease is transmitted (airborne, blood, food, sex, etc.).
  • It can show who is most vulnerable to a disease.
  • It can guide people’s decision-making on how to protect themselves and their loved ones.
  • It can guide public health recommendations.
  • It can guide how we allocate our resources.

We then thought about the follow-up question: “Why is that important?” Here’s what I wrote (again, I have a very high opinion of my work (which is why I do it, in addition to it being interesting)):

  • It can save lives (if done quickly).
  • It can give people agency (if communicated well and if the government helps).

Then we asked ourselves the next follow-up question, which you can probably guess: “Why is that important?”

To which I answered: because life and health and agency are important.

So when I talk about my work, that last one should go first (or maybe in this case be skipped), then the second one, and only then the third—and only then the information I am used to presenting first, the specifics of what we do and how it works.

Speaking of meaning—

The first Friday of Science Education Partners was on (Friday) the 13th, on Old New Year’s Eve on the Julian calendar. That night the tradition is to get together with friends and toast to the old year and then the new year, same as on New Year’s but less of a big affair/more cozy; I was back in Cambridge/Salem at that point and we went to a cocktail bar for karaoke in a small group. Then the next day was Old New Year, the last of my five holidays of the winter and the definitive end to 2022.

This winter we spent a month in Key Largo in a house along a channel, with kayaks and the ocean. The owners had a few plants outside that looked dead; over the month my grandmother and I watered them and nursed them back to health. By the end of the month they looked happy. Here they are:

“Fun, exciting, and interesting along the way”—Lab Alumni PIs Academic Career Panel

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About a week ago we the grad students in our lab virtually hosted a panel* of a few* of the lab alumni who after their postdocs with us are now professors. I get a lot of messaging (from the University, surprisingly, and from student groups and of course from twitter) against academia and toward industry—about the transition from academia to industry, about destigmatizing “leaving” academia, about the flaws in the academic system, about low pay in academia, about how miserable everyone is, etc.—, I think to try to balance the pressure to follow an academic career path after a PhD but somehow at least the pieces that reach me have tipped in the other direction, to the extent that I don’t think I receive much pro-academia or even happy-academia messaging at all. I really enjoyed this panel. Everyone seemed happy. After the conversations I’m used to it was like stepping out of a loud smoke-filled bar into an open hillside with cows grazing. I want to share it with you, in case you see a potential future for yourself in academia, like I do, because I was reassured to know that that hopeful future can stay hopeful and light and that there are people in my field who love their jobs.

We asked about what we can do in grad school to be better prepared for a career in academia. Along the same lines, we also asked what the most important and underrated skill to focus on building in a postdoc is:

  • You learn A LOT as a grad student.
  • The fellowships you apply for are great practice in writing proposals. You get better at it; you learn how to use feedback.
  • Learn all of the stuff that happens behind the scenes—what gets funded, what doesn’t. Learn how money is spent.
  • Network and find connections.
  • Write papers well.
  • Learn the nitty-gritty of your science, but also the big picture of your science.
  • As a PI, managing people is new—being a cheerleader for the team is critical, and it’s something you can work on in a postdoc.

On applying to postdocs and finding a good lab for your postdoc:

  • When looking for a postdoc, look for the specific things YOU need to grow in.
  • Meet with people at conferences.
  • Meet others in the lab to get the vibe of the lab you’re interested in.
  • Tell people DIRECTLY and candidly that you are applying for postdocs. BE DIRECT.
  • Your postdoc is your last opportunity to do something totally different from what you’ve been doing.
  • Getting a postdoc is all about personal connections, or it can be.
  • For your postdoc, find a lab that gives autonomy—enough autonomy to learn how to run a research project, with training wheels. You don’t want a lab where postdocs are treated like “super grad students.”
  • A larger lab can be more autonomous. On the other hand, there can be less opportunity for direct mentorship from the PI in a large lab.
  • Get a fellowship; then you can go wherever you want.

On applying for professorship jobs:

  • The job committee wants to know what you’re doing that will make science better for their university in the future.
  • The job committee also wants to know you can bring in grants.
  • Talk with faculty in the department you’re applying to.
  • Your applications are a crapshoot—the commitee uses imperfect heuristics to get the job done. There’s a lot behind the scenes you can’t see from the job posting.
  • Don’t make enemies—a single advocate can push your application forward, while a single nemesis can sink you.
  • Apply to a lot of positions.
  • You have an edge if you have interesting science, connections, and a well-written proposal.
  • Pay attention to teaching requirements—at a non-R1 university, you will actually be teaching, whereas in other universities you might have very few teaching responsibilities. Our panelists had a wide range of teaching requirements, from a lot to almost none.
  • Look for the kind of position YOU WANT.

On moving (or not moving) for jobs in academia:

  • There is a bias against people who don’t want to move or are attached to a particular area.
  • On the other hand, passion to be in a certain location can also be an advantage, and a big one, because it also shows you are more likely to take the position. If you’re targeted in your search, your commitment comes through.
  • Interviewers might legally not be allowed to ask about your partner or your personal life, depending on the state. Tell them up front about your partner, their job needs, and any other parts of your personal life that affect your job search and your interest in and needs within this particular job.

On the job of being a PI:

  • You learn quickly as a PI that even though you’re the same person you always were, everything you say carries more weight than it did before you got the Professor title.
  • Think about and try to learn whether or not you will actually like the job of being a PI. The actual job involves a lot of management and a lot of writing.
  • Once you become a professor, there is no one you report to regarding what you are doing as long as you can get money.
  • There is room to make the job what you want it to be, but even small labs come with a lot of work; making even a small team run is really hard.

One of us asked when our panelists found “their thing”:

  • One of our panelists got hooked in undergrad (“some fire was lit inside of me in one class”), which as a person who also occasionally teaches made me very happy to hear.
  • In science, some things you find interesting, while some things FASCINATE you.
  • Going down rabbit holes* is a good fit for academia.
  • You have to be creative and excited about your ideas.
  • You should try to find an intersection between what people will give you money to study and what you are naturally interested in (—and that intersection might also be a role in industry).

On doing science:

  • Just do the science you really want to do; don’t think just about tenure.
  • Have a proven track record of fantastic research.
  • Look for opportunities as you encounter them.
  • Have a five-year goal that you slowly move towards, but keep all doors open. If getting to your five-year goal will be miserable or you’ll hate the process, that’s a red flag and a sign that your five-year goal should change. Your five-year goal needs to be fun, exciting, and interesting along the way.

General advice:

  • When you need to get in touch with a professor, email them multiple times—again if they don’t respond.
  • At every point in your academic career, your life keeps going. Don’t put it on hold—live your life.
  • “I liked what I was doing.”—enjoy it. Don’t torture yourself. Your job should be a job you love.

* (I organized this panel, which was one of those things I was very very excited for then forgot I did until I appeared at the meeting thankfully on time and was surprised and delighted to discover that that thing I wanted to happen was, indeed, happening, and happening now, and I was doing it, and doing it now—and then it went great and it was really lovely.)

* (We have TONS of lab alumni who are now professors with labs of their own, but I like a panel of three people; any more than three feels like we wouldn’t really get to know anyone.)

* (I very much like to go down rabbit holes.)

What I’ve Learned About Making Scientific Posters

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I was lucky to get to present our now published recent work, learning from last summer’s SARS-CoV-2 Delta outbreak in Ptown, at last winter’s Broad retreat. My goal was entirely to do justice to the work and the massive number of people who did that work, but to my surprise and delight we won a poster prize in the Computational Biology and Data Science category, which as you might imagine is one of the largest and most interesting categories at the Broad. I think our poster won primarily because of the project, not the poster itself, but I think the poster itself had to have also been pretty okay, at the very least clear and effective. I learned a lot putting it together, and I also learned a lot putting together other, not as astoundingly successful posters in past years and collecting my colleagues’ good advice.

Here is how the poster turned out:

The first thing I did was add the title, stretched in very large (size 85) font to cover the entire top of the poster, so that people could easily read it from far away. Our poster title was the title of our paper: Transmission from vaccinated individuals in a large SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant outbreak.

I divided the poster itself into two columns, expecting that after the title the reader would read the left column from top to bottom and then the right column from top to bottom. The left column starts with the author list and the graphical abstract side by side. The author list, which is huge, is in small-ish (size 18) font, with affiliations in even smaller font (size 12) below it. The graphical abstract is gorgeous and effective and was made by the Broad Pattern team in a process that was both extremely impressive and also very collaborative and iterative, a lot like the process of putting together the eventual journal cover with Thought Café. This project was my first time working with professional scientific illustrators, more scientific and detailed in the case of the graphical abstract and more abstract (a pun! yay!) in the case of the cover.

The rest of the poster dives into the science. Our abstract does a great job summarizing the work and our findings (the purpose of the abstract), so I organized our the bulk of the poster around the abstract, in its entirety, divided into five parts and shown in large (size 37) text.

The first sentence of our abstract covers background on the outbreak and gives context for the questions we ask in the paper. I put this sentence first after the author list and graphical abstract, on its own in the middle of the left column:

An outbreak of over one thousand COVID-19 cases in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in July 2021—the first large outbreak mostly in vaccinated individuals in the US—prompted a comprehensive public health response, motivating changes to national masking recommendations and raising questions about infection and transmission among vaccinated individuals.

The rest of the abstract presents the four takeaways of the paper, each in one sentence:

  1. To address these questions, we combined genomic and epidemiological data from 467 individuals, including 40% of known outbreak-associated cases.
  2. The Delta variant accounted for 99% of outbreak-associated cases in this dataset; it was introduced from at least 40 sources, but 83% of cases derived from a single source, likely through transmission across multiple settings over a short time rather than a single event.
  3. Genomic and epidemiological data supported multiple transmissions of Delta from and between fully vaccinated individuals.
  4. Despite its magnitude, the outbreak had limited onward impact in MA and the US, likely due to high vaccination rates and a robust public health response.

I gave each of these points its own results section on the poster, in order, in whatever way I was able to get them to fit in the two columns. The first point ended up at the bottom of the left column and the other three divided the right column more or less equally.

Each results section starts with its sentence from the abstract, in large font as a header for the section, padded by at least some whitespace above and below. The hope is that a person with not a lot of time to dedicate to the poster can grasp the main takeaways simply by reading everything that is in the largest font. In all cases but one the section’s header sentence is at the top of the section; in one case the content of the section was tall so the large-font sentence is in the top left, which is still easy to find and I think adds some pleasant variety to the layout.

Next, I pulled out the figure panels that contributed to the message of each results section. The figure panels in a section were not always from the same figures and were not only from the main figures. Here are the figure panels that ended up included in each section of the poster:

  • Section 1: Figure 1 in its entirety and Figure S1 in its entirety
  • Section 2: Figure 2A and Figure S4A
  • Section 3: Figure 3 in its entirety and Figure S5C
  • Section 4: Figure 2C and Figure S4B

I added the figure legends around the figures in very small (size 14) text, so that someone who really wants to can read them and someone who does not want to read them can easily ignore them. In a few cases I was able to fit the entire figure legend for a panel under that panel, but in most cases I had to clump the figure legends together with labels like Left, Right, Middle, Top, Left Top, and Left Inset. Like a game of Twister but for the eyes.

I did not include any figure and panel numbers or references to other figure panels, because I wanted the figures to be at home in the poster and not just visiting from the paper.

Finally, I added three QR codes, because I had seen QR codes on other posters and found them absolutely delightful and very novel. They are probably neither delightful nor novel at this point (and probably weren’t delightful or novel at that point either) but I think they were useful.

One QR code leads to our interactive tree, where you can examine the temporal and genetic relationships between our SARS-CoV-2 sequences in the context of other Delta sequences. This tree is most relevant to the second results section of the poster so I placed it there, with “Interactive tree” and a little arrow to the QR code.

The other two QR codes are relevant to the paper as a whole. One points to the preprint (the paper was not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal) and the other points to the tweetorial I wrote summarizing the paper both for people who are in our relatively small subfield of biology and hopefully also for people who are not. I put these two QR codes at the very bottom left of the poster, because that is the corner that had space. In addition to squishing them into a corner I also put a little box around them to signify that they are separate from the results section they are next to. I also labeled them: “Preprint” and “Tweetorial” with little arrows to the QR codes. (Really the arrows should point from the QR codes to the things the QR codes point to, and not the other way around, but that’s too complicated and not a hill I was willing to kill this poster on.)

And that brings us to the poster’s final form:

Here are the five lessons I learned:

  1. Information should be presented in order along the path you expect the eye to follow.
  2. The more QR codes the better. This is half-joking, but three was clearly not too many.
  3. The most important takeaways should be in the biggest font, with font size corresponding to importance.
  4. The poster should be skimmable to the reader’s preference of skimmability. I used to think there should be minimal text, and I still do, but now I think it is also important to give an interested reader something to look at more closely. But any text that is not an important takeaway should be unintimidating and easy to avoid reading if a reader does not have time or spoons to read it.
  5. I’ve seen a lot of posters that show the background, methods, results, and conclusions, each in its own section, and in most cases I personally much prefer when a poster focuses on and is organized around the big takeaways of the work. I don’t remember a lot long-term; it helps to be directed to the important parts. (Of course, it is entirely possible that the next project I make a poster for will be perfect for the background-methods-results-conclusions format and I will take this all back.)

Here is the poster as a zoomable pdf:

PTown retreat posterDownload

Here is a video of the poster printing (!). It’s silly, but it was exciting for me:

I couldn’t get my poster to send itself to the poster printer (the morning of the poster session, because as hard as I try that is the timeline I apparently work on) and a fellow Broadie helped me because that is just what the Broad culture is like, a cozy and collaborative (and absurdly smart) home.

Here is the poster on its poster board, at poster spot 2, poster spot 2 itself being a great honor:

Because of its layout, the poster was very easy to present. The poster session was in person, which was also very fun. I was able to simply gesture to and summarize the main points and describe the takeaways from the figures that led to the main points. When a new person joined I was able to quickly interrupt myself to summarize the project overall, I think along with a quick list of the main points while gesturing to them, and then jump back into the point I was presenting. I cycled through the main points as people came and went.

I was lucky that I was very much on that day; it was absolutely one of my better presentation days, and the project itself had filled my entire brain for months. I really enjoyed presenting to the smaller groups that visited our poster; it felt more like a conversation than a presentation. I liked that people were comfortable interrupting me to ask questions and I liked that I was able to think about the questions for longer than I usually feel comfortable stopping during a talk. I have noticed over the past year that I really like being able to make eye contact with people and feel like we are in conversation. The more conversational and less formal the situation feels, the better I am at presenting the work, a little correlated (R2 being maybe about 0.65) with the number of people I am talking with. I have not recently given a talk in person, but the pattern seems to hold at least over zoom and in this one in-person poster session. I’d like to learn how to bring the same energy to all my presentations, including in contexts that are more challenging or high stakes. Something to strive for and remember very fondly. This poster session was amazing. I want all my communication about my work to feel like it felt.

Window View

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This is my favorite window view at work. It is right by the coffee machine in the little kitchenette on the 6th floor of the Broad, where I work. When I am waiting for my coffee I like to stand by this window. The view is of a corner of the Broad Institute and one side of the Whitehead Institute. Every square in this large grid is a part of a lab; each little window contains miniature people like me whose days are spent in the lab and in front of the computer—in my view, just a two-dimensional glass square and sometimes the publications that ultimately flow out of it; to them, everything, and if they looked out their window they’d see me waiting for my coffee and I would be small.

This is my favorite window view at home. We live in Peabody, which is not quite a suburb, more a small town in its own right but without the usual trappings of a small town, and far too far away to be an extension of Boston like Cambridge is. As I write this it’s raining, and foggy, and dark—the start of spring. Cars bring up rain from the street and their headlights illuminate it and the lights and the chimneys and the treetops are outlined in the bright night sky, and you can just see the lights on our fence. I grew up in a neighborhood without fences, low to the ground; now I live and I work exclusively in tall places, surrounded always by the little lights of other people’s lives.

In 2020, right before the start of the pandemic, I bought myself tickets to see Carmen at the Boston Ballet as a late birthday present. Carmen was postponed to August, then canceled, and now in 2022 I have transferred my tickets finally to see a ballet set to the Rolling Stones as a late birthday present.

Ballet has a magical effect. The last time I went to the ballet I saw Robbins. I was just about to start my PhD. On the way home on the train platform waiting for the Red Line, looking over the tracks at the other platform, everything seemed magical, timed. For a few hours I saw intention in everyone’s movements and postures and I felt a beautiful connection to the train schedule and to the city and everywhere I looked I saw mathematics and art. I felt myself a part of a giant clock, ticking and ticking and me so small in it. And tonight looking out at the windows and the fog I feel a part of a giant clock, ticking and ticking and me so small in it.

Tick tick tick.

The Story of Our Cell Cover

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Possibly the coolest thing that’s happened to me, definitely the coolest thing that’s happened to me professionally, is getting to be a part of a project that not only got to be in Cell, but also got to be on the cover of Cell. In this blog post, I want to tell you about the process that created that cover, because it’s very different from anything else that has happened to me and I think it went extraordinarily well.

We worked with Thought Café, whom you might recognize because they also illustrate CrashCourse videos. We worked with Julia Nadeau, Head of Production, and with amazing illustrator Eric Diotte—check out Eric’s instagram and web site:

Initial Brainstorming

A few of us (Katie S., Gage, Bronwyn, Danny, Steve S., and I) from deep in the science of the project on the Broad side of the collaboration met and brainstormed as a group before engaging the illustration team. This was a very fun meeting—we all pitched ideas for the cover and riffed off each other. After our brainstorming session, I sent an initial email to the illustration team. In this initial email, I included:

I also included a summary of our group’s initial brainstorming—

Looking at existing Cell covers, we think we’re going to want to go for something more abstract, with mostly metaphorical connection to the work and with some elements added in literally.

(Can you tell I love Escher?)

The one thing I did not include but should have included is examples of existing Cell covers that we liked. (Julia asked for links to existing Cell covers and we provided them in a follow-up email.)

Initial Sketches

Because we had brainstormed ahead of time, Eric already had sketches of the four most promising of our ideas ready for our initial meeting.

We talked through each of the four:

  • In A, a dandelion flower has SARS-CoV-2 virions in place of the seeds. Its seeds, the SARS-CoV-2 virions, blow off the flower and into the air; in the background are rolling hills of many, many dandelion flowers.
  • In B, a tree has many dense branches (like a phylogenetic tree of an outbreak) and roots made of genetic material, with SARS-CoV-2 virions growing like flowers on its branches and appearing in the air around it.
  • In C, a wave represents the different “waves” of COVID, SARS-CoV-2 virions appearing in the foam.
  • In D, colorful wildflowers shaped like SARS-CoV-2 virions represents the many introductions of Delta into the outbreak; in the background are fields of identical flowers showing that only one plant had taken over, one Delta introduction accounting for most of the outbreak.

Eric modified the dandelions live during our meeting, confining them to a bubble to convey that the Ptown outbreak was successfully contained.

At this stage the dandelions were my personal favorite because I love dandelions as a metaphor for pretty much anything, but the dandelions were getting complicated in their bubble and they didn’t neatly fit the actual messages we wanted to convey. We couldn’t decide on a favorite as a group, so we polled the covid side of the lab over slack to choose between the two top contenders, Hokusai and the dandelions. Hokusai was of course a very clear winner.

Revision and Final Version

Having chosen our overall vision of Hokusai’s Delta wave, we then went through a series of (very) fast revisions with Eric and Julia. Eric revised, Julia sent us the revisions, we discussed internally and suggested, Eric revised, and so on. This was a very collaborative and iterative process: seeing the image converge in the direction of its final form made that direction much clearer, and in almost all cases, we didn’t know what we wanted until we saw something almost but not quite there. The final, polished version looks like this:

I’m very proud of this image. Eric did an extraordinary job, and every detail is something special to us. Here is the write-up I sent Cell describing each of the details:

This cover is a reference to Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa—in this case illustrating instead the SARS-CoV-2 Delta wave in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In “Transmission from vaccinated individuals in a large SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant outbreak,” we use genomic sequencing to learn from the first wave of the Delta variant in Massachusetts, which resulted in a large outbreak in the coastal tourist town of Provincetown. The proposed cover image shows waves containing SARS-CoV-2 virions crashing into a lighthouse. The lighthouse shines a light at the waves, illuminating the single-stranded RNA genomes in the SARS-CoV-2 virions. In this illustration, the waves represent waves of the Delta variant, while the lighthouse represents Provincetown, the site of the outbreak we studied. The light emanating from the lighthouse represents genomic sequencing. The wave that is illuminated, or sequenced, is the first wave approaching Provincetown; it represents the Provincetown outbreak, which was the first wave of Delta in Massachusetts. The Provincetown outbreak was not the largest wave of Delta in Massachusetts, and so the illuminated wave in the illustration is similarly closely followed by another, larger wave. The water to the right of the waves is calm, to signify that Provincetown had very few COVID-19 cases before the outbreak. The lighthouse itself recreates the distinct and consistent coloration and silhouette of the real lighthouses in Provincetown.

If you’ve enjoyed the cover and the process behind it, you might also enjoy the paper it’s about, “Transmission from vaccinated individuals in a large SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant outbreak,” out in Cell.

Tweeting About Your Science: My Guide/What I’ve Learned

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All of the notable things I have ever done—being born, my weird space cow art, my long-form blogging about my mental health, my long-form blogging about underwear, probably other things—were on October 21st rapidly surpassed or at least matched in measurable viewership by 35 words, one emoji, two images, and a link.

The characters in question live in my twitter thread summarizing our study on the July COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts—then a preprint, now out in print on the cover of Cell. As I write this sentence, the first tweet of the thread has been viewed over 100,000 times, most of those views having happened within days of the tweet—which means that more than twice the population of my hometown saw at least a summary of our main findings at the moment they had the greatest potential for public health impact. I am quite delighted that the research we all poured our minds and hearts and summer and autumn into was seen by so many people so quickly. I am very impressed by how fast it spread and to whom.

Tweeting about science isn’t something I thought I was good at (and this was my first time doing it), but since it went so well I want to share with you what I’ve learned—for a long time as a consumer and now apparently as a creator. Here is my guide to writing a good twitter thread (tweetorial or tweetstorm, though I’m not a fan of either word) about your research.

Step 0: Before You Tweet

Before you start drafting your tweets, think about who your audience is and what you want your audience to take away from your work:

  1. What are your key scientific findings?
  2. How do you hope your key scientific findings will contribute to people’s everyday lives, immediately or someday?
  3. What action do you want to inspire? Are you hoping that people will alter their behavior? Are you hoping that people will use your tool? Are you hoping that people will build on something you’ve started?
  4. As you wrote the above, whom did you think of? Who are the people who are positioned to use your work immediately? Who are the other people who might also be interested in knowing about it? Who else might stumble on it?
  5. Do you have strong emotions about your work? Do you feel delighted? surprised? grateful? horrified? Is there a particular emotion you want your audience to feel? Are you hoping to delight? to surprise? to horrify? How strong is your own emotion? Does it contribute to your message or does it detract from your message?
  6. In what ways can your work be misinterpreted, misunderstood, or misused, unintentionally or maliciously? Can your work be used to fuel misinformation? Can your work be used to fuel hatred? What content did you personally find helpful in understanding how your work fits into a compassionate, good world? What content might help correct possible misinterpretions of your work?

Step 1: The First Tweet

The first tweet in your thread is the most important tweet of your thread. Most people will not click your link to read your paper and most people will not click your first tweet to read the full thread. For many people, this first tweet is all they will see of your work. It should communicate enough of your main findings and your call to action that not seeing the rest is more or less okay.

To maximize the chance that someone scrolling will read and understand it, your first tweet, more than any of the other tweets in the thread, needs to be short, be easy to understand, and not look like a block of text. Where possible, I recommend using bulleted lists and breaking up your text with plenty of vertical whitespace.

Your first tweet should include a link to the paper (though some people save it for late in the thread, as a sort of reward). If you don’t like the preview that appears when you paste in the URL, you can attach an image. I attached two images: one with the title and one with the abstract. Maybe you have a very pretty image, or a graphic that nicely summarizes your main findings—those would be nice to attach instead. We did not have a graphical abstract yet when I posted this thread, but if I were posting it today I would attach our graphical abstract instead of the images I did attach.

Your first tweet should have some indication that there is a thread attached to it. That indication can be the thread emoji (🧵) or the word thread, perhaps with an arrow (⬇), or it can be a a 1/, or it can be something else.

The first tweet also needs to do the important work of appearing in search results when people look up keywords. Try searching terms related to your work. Look at what results appear on twitter, how many results appear, what kinds of discussions are happening around those terms, and if those discussions involve the audience you are hoping will see your work. In my case, I knew that my twitter thread needed to contain the following keywords:

  • COVID-19
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • Provincetown
  • Ptown
  • outbreak
  • Delta
  • vaccinated
  • vaxxed
  • vaccine
  • public health
  • symptoms

(I don’t see any reason to use hashtags for these keywords—the terms appear in search results regardless of whether or not they have a hashtag in front of them, and having that many hashtags just seems a bit alarming. But I could be wrong.)

These 11 words account for almost a third of the 35 total words of the tweet. I made sacrifices to ensure that they all appeared. (Vaccinated, for example, is much longer than vaxxed, and Provincetown is much longer than Ptown—but they each produce their own search results and I wanted our paper to appear in all of them.)

If you would like and if it comes naturally, you can also (or alternatively) include in your first tweet some kind of a hook—a funny joke, a cliffhanger, an unanswered question, or content that elicits an emotional response. With a hook people will be more likely to click to read the details, but they are also less likely to walk away understanding your work if they don’t click. If the thing that is important to you is that as many people as possible walk away with some understanding of your work, you probably want to summarize your work in the first tweet. If you would like to connect more deeply with a smaller number of people, rather than shallowly with a large number of people, it might be better to use a hook. (I of course did not do that.)

Finally, I think it is important to include yourself in the work. The science is done by people and people like other people. I start the first tweet with Our and many of my other tweets in the thread start with We. I am a person who likes exclamation marks so I include exclamation marks—because exclamation marks best capture how I feel about this paper.

Things to Know

Here are seven general principles to keep in mind as you draft your twitter thread.

  1. I recommend you draft your tweets in Google Docs or similar, and that you get feedback from your co-authors and revise at least once before posting. This thread took me three days with feedback from multiple co-authors: Katie, Bronwyn, Gage, and Pardis all helped me revise this thread and made it much better. (In its original form, it didn’t even have capital letters.)
  2. Each tweet should be its own complete thought. If a person retweets one tweet from your thread and not any of the others, its message should be clear. It should not be possible to take any individual tweet out of context to mean something you did not intend.
  3. Where possible, and especially when making important points, make your text easier to digest by breaking it into bullet points or breaking it up with vertical whitespace.
  4. If you include a url in your tweet, your tweet will have a nice link preview. If you attach any images to your tweet, the link preview will not appear. The link preview in the final, posted tweet will look the same as it looks in the draft tweet before you post.
  5. If you end your tweet in a url (if the url is the very, very last thing in your tweet) and you have not attached any images, the url itself will not appear in the tweet when it is posted (but the link preview will).
  6. Most people do not click on images. You should size your images so that the preview that people see on twitter looks the same as the image itself. If you are attaching one image, it should be 1500 pixels wide and 850 pixels tall (or scaled with that same aspect ratio). If you are attaching more than one image, all of your images should be square. The final cropping of the images does not always match the preview of your tweet draft, nor is it consistent between devices. If it is important that people see the entire image, including the edges, add some white space all around your image so that the content of the image will still be visible even the edges are slightly cropped. (If you do not have image editing software, you can download and use GIMP for free.) I do not recommend attaching more than two images—the previews will be too small to see without clicking, and most people will not click.
  7. Create a secret fake twitter account to test out your tweets before posting them for real. Delete your test tweets immediately. Do test post the actual images you intend to post to make sure they appear as you expect them to appear and are cropped as you expect them to be cropped. Do not link to your work or post any of the actual text you intend to post—not even for a moment. Other than images, replace your actual text with dummy text and your actual urls with dummy urls when you test post. You can also use this account to draft your actual tweets (without posting them) to make sure they fit within the character limit—don’t rely on other applications to count characters; they all seem to count in their own ways.

Step 2: Context, Background, Collaborations

This part is easy. I initially had this tweet closer to the end, but my co-authors encouraged me to move it to the front and I think it is much better here. We start off by acknowledging the organizations involved in this study, because the list was huge. If it were a much smaller study, I might start off by acknowledging the individual authors. It is also helpful to start off with some context—has this work been peer reviewed? Does this work build on previous work? Does this work build on anything familiar to the audience?

If someone has clicked your first tweet to read the thread, they are already in and willing to skim. Your second tweet does not have to be very exciting.

You might notice that while this tweet includes an attractive preview of the link, it does not include the actual url. That is because the url is pasted after the 2/. Because the url is the very last thing in the tweet and there is no image attached to the tweet, the actual url does not appear.

Step 3: Paper Summary

The paper summary will likely be the bulk of your thread. As much as possible, each tweet should include one complete and clear idea and be retweetable on its own. Where relevant, you should include figures from the paper. Try to add some emojis. You can also include links to previous work or work that you use or build on. I start many of these tweets with We.

The order in which ideas appear and the ways you present those ideas might not match their order or presentation in the paper. Your audience on twitter is almost definitely broader than the audience you wrote the paper for, and your language and narrative should adapt. Your focus should be on communicating the findings that are most relevant to this broader audience in a way that is understandable (and not condescending), with minimal jargon. In some cases you might want to delve into more detail, and that’s okay—tweets including jargon should be easy to skim and easy to grasp at least the purpose of without extensive background in your field and should not be necessary for understanding the overall story.

Step 4: Findings Summary

Your paper summary should end in a tweet summarizing the findings that are most relevant to your audience, or most actionable.

Step 5: Your Findings Out in the World

This is the hardest part.

This section is about the role you hope your work will play in the world, and it is a part of your efforts to shape that role. Here, you need to anticipate the ways in which your work could be used to misinform or hurt. You should address possible misinterpretations explicitly and head on. You should provide links to informative content people can engage with to address possible misinterpretations before they arise. Wherever possible, that content should be readable by people outside your field.

If you are less worried about misinterpretation or misuse of your work, you can instead or additionally use this space to explore the life you hope your work will live in the world—how you hope people will use or build on your work, or your own emotional response (if you have one you’d like to share) to your findings.

In either case, it is nice to end with a positive or hopeful feeling before your call to action, because hope is empowering.

Step 6: Key Takeaways/Calls to Action

Finally, at the very end, I have the final takeaways (the third time I am adding takeaways—but that is what this thread is). These takeaways do not relate to the content of the paper itself; instead, they are focused on how I hope the paper’s findings will be useful in the real world. I end by making explicit the calls to action I tried to imply in the first tweet and have been building toward throughout the thread.

Step 7: The End/Thank Yous

This part is fun (and easy). Thank your co-authors—the first and last authors first, if the full author list is very long, and the full author list listed out or in summary. If anyone is on twitter, tag them.

When you are ready to post, use twitter in a web browser on your computer (not the app on your phone) to prepare the thread in advance and then post the entire thread at the same time.

The time you post your thread is important. Don’t tweet when your target audience is having dinner or asleep. I think it’s probably best to time your thread for when your target audience is browsing twitter at work, but there are tons of more informed articles on timing of tweets that you can read instead of using my guesswork.

Finally, the number of people twitter shows your tweet to is determined not only by the number of likes and retweets your tweet gets, but also by the speed at which it gets them. Tell your colleagues and co-authors about your tweet immediately after you tweet it. Hopefully they will engage with it quickly and help it spread.

That’s all! I hope this guide helps your work reach its audience.

If you would like, you can view (and retweet!) this thread in its home on twitter and read the paper the thread is about. You can also read an article about the power of twitter to disseminate scientific research, which I found on twitter.

Freaky Mushroom Abominations, Now in Convenient Flesh Tones

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Mushrooms!

A while ago, I blogged about growing oyster mushrooms from a kit I impulse bought at Whole Foods and promised you updates on the larger, pinker version I bought online. Well! This blog post is those updates.

To preface, the growth conditions have changed. Last time, we grew them by a window in the living room, facing the evening sun. This time, we grew them by a window in our bedroom, facing the late morning sun. This change was made because our roommate Helen requested that the grotesque flesh-colored mushrooms that look a bit like vulvas and a lot like dislodged bubbly organs be grown in a place that is not the kitchen or the living room, preferably somewhere she doesn’t have to perceive them every day and especially not around food. This was right after a long discussion of viral taxonomy and right before I told her about the recent discovery that sperms swim in a corkscrew motion, not by swishing their tails back and forth as it appears when they are viewed as a two-dimensional projection from above. (I make an excellent roommate.)

Copied verbatim from my last mushroom blog post, because I will never get over them, here are some interesting facts about P. ostreatus (oyster mushrooms) from Wikipedia (species article and genus article):

  • “The oyster mushroom is one of the few species of carnivorous mushroom, having been known to eat bacteria and tiny worms called nematodes.”
  • “It was first cultivated in Germany as a subsistence measure during World War I.”
  • “Pleurotus fungi have been used in mycoremediation (fungus-based bioremediation) of pollutants such as petroleum and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.”
  • “Oyster mushrooms contain Lovastatin, a form of cholesterol lowering statin.”

Without further ado, here is my new mushroom diary, in ✨ pink ✨:

September 9, 9:55 am

After soaking in water overnight. Cozy, warm, and moist. Precious bébés.

September 11, 11:00 am

September 11, 9:28 pm

Just one long workday, and so much growth! The same awe I get watching buildings get built—gorgeous.

September 12, 12:31 pm

September 13, 4:25 pm

September 14, 1:29 pm

September 15, 1:05 pm

September 15, 7:48 pm

Harvest!

September 15, 8:13 pm

We cooked them into pasta, riffing off several recipes in Food Lab, our favorite cookbook.

September 22, 4:14 pm

Our second harvest started growing about a week later.

September 23, 7:50 am

You can see more of them lurking in the darkness along the sides of the box.

September 24, 9:00 am

September 27, 4:51 pm

September 28, 12:02 pm

October 1, 6:23 pm

Second harvest! This time we cooked them into rice, along with a tiny red pepper from one of our upside-down window gardens.

There is something deeply special and human and good-feeling to growing mushrooms. They smell nice like dirt smells nice and you get to water them and watch them grow every day and know that they are growing because you are watering them. The experience was extra special because I bought my parents a box, too, and I got to see their progress growing their own matching mushrooms while I grew mine. I deeply miss being in the same room as my family, so seeing and smelling and tasting the same mushrooms despite the distance had an extra layer of warm happy feelings.

Mushrooms!

After Years of Struggle, I Finally Learned How to Give an Excellent Presentation

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova3 Comments

A number of Thursdays ago this semester I gave my first ever excellent, perfect, no-regrets presentation. Here I am, post-shower and maybe an hour pre-presentation:

(My grandmother gifted me that gorgeous necklace, as well as most of my other really pretty necklaces. My glasses I bought online for sub-$15, which is a new-ish favorite discovery of mine, as of a few years ago. The shirt I bought in California while visiting my partner’s family (I get overwhelmed by the lights in malls and my decision-making gets tripped up). The cardigan is my favorite old cardigan. It has a huge hole in the armpit I only recently sewed up. You can’t see the armpit hole over zoom. The creatures behind me are the viruses I am studying, looming, presumably in some blood, also looming.)

Here is my set-up:

If you look closely, you can spy the following items:

  1. My clicker, even though my presentation was over zoom. Using the clicker allowed me to sit farther away from the screen, which made for a better image of my face, and, more importantly, prevented me from fidgeting with the computer in a way that would be audible to the audience over zoom.
  2. A lamp, for nice lighting for the presentation (otherwise I look a bit dark and distractedly don’t match the lighting on the artist’s rendition of the subjects of my presentation).
  3. My phone, plugged in, silenced, and on airplane mode with screen timeout turned off, with a timer set for the length of my presentation.
  4. Paper and pen, out of the way but within reach, in case anyone made any suggestions I wanted to write down.
  5. My to-do list notebook (pink on top of the stack of books)—nearby for comfort (I take it everywhere, including bed) but out of sight.
  6. The Relentless Moon, the third book in the Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal and the book I was reading at the moment, to remind me that there are nice things I enjoy I’ll get to do soon.

I took a lot of communications-focused courses at MIT. Almost all of them were about writing, which has served me extremely well. Though other classes I took did include one or two presentations, as far as I remember only one (6-unit (or half a normal course)) class actually explicitly focused on public speaking (not that I actively sought out additional public speaking educational opportunities—I didn’t), and that was 6.UAT—a course I did not fully appreciate at the time, because it was difficult for me in ways that made me uncomfortable, because public speaking made me uncomfortable, but which has turned out extremely useful for me since communication, including public speaking, has turned out to be a very important part of my job.

When I took 6.UAT I was very bad at public speaking, and I think I was still pretty bad at public speaking when the semester ended, though hopefully less bad. I remember learning to make eye contact, and not to fidget as much, and (from a particularly upsetting class where we viewed our presentations on camera) that my posture was just awful, a flaw I have improved at least a little through lots of yoga (though I imagine my posture is still awful, and I absolutely would not like to see myself on camera today either). That should tell you just about how low the bar was for me for starters.

6.UAT also taught me an extremely valuable lesson, perhaps the most valuable lesson, which I failed to actually incorporate into my presentations until just now. It is painfully simple—it almost hurts how simple it is. It is this:

✨ • ✨ • PRACTICE. • ✨ • ✨

Usually, when preparing for presentations, I focus almost entirely (or entirely) on my slide deck. I put together a silly number of slides. I make them all perfect. I memorize where they are in my presentation, including backup slides as potential responses to the many, many potential questions I’ve anticipated, which I used to fit at the end and lately, ever since I discovered hidden slides, have been slipping into their places in the narrative as hidden slides. Often, I have an epiphany about my work and generate some brand new figures specifically to add in as slides. This is probably productive for the project overall but it takes a very long time. Usually, I pull an all-nighter the night before, ostensibly to make sure my slides are ready, numerous, and perfect but actually, if I look deep into my soul, probably actually because I am usually very nervous before a presentation and have no work-life balance and a lot of trouble shutting off at night (as evidenced by me writing this blog post in bed after midnight). Then, for the actual presentation, I am exhausted, I have no concept of timing, everything takes longer than I expect, and I go over time, leaving very little room for questions and probably not a great impression overall. I almost never actually make it through all of my beautiful slides. At worst, I am preparing my slides up to the very minute before my presentation. At worst, (back when things were in person) I am late. This is my routine. This is how I am comfortable. (This is my design.)

Most of my presentations so far had been in front of a small group. Because most of our lab’s work happens in teams, I often present work to my labmates and collaborators. These presentations are largely informal, and I have gotten very comfortable with them, to the extent that I do not get nervous before them at all and prepare my slides during analysis in anticipation of presenting my work when the opportunity appears. I think I am very good at presentations during a small-group meeting. The only big change I am still working on is time management. I sometimes get less time in a meeting than expected and end up needing to go over time; I also sometimes allow too much conversation in the first half of a presentation and lose time for the second half.

I also, occasionally, present in front of the entire lab or in front of a broader but still lab-sized group of coworkers. These presentations are still a bit nervous, and I still sometimes have a lot of trouble sleeping or even disconnecting the night before. My slides are usually done, since I am mostly or entirely able to pull slides from the smaller update presentations I have already given to smaller groups of labmates. These meetings are usually an hour long, which makes time management easier, but they also invite (valuable!) input from more people, which makes time management harder. I need more practice presenting to larger groups—enough practice that I am not nervous at all and am able to be fully present to receive feedback and learn from the conversation generated by my work. Other than time management, I think I most need to work on confidently taking up space, including walking and eye contact, and figuring out something like gesturing rather than nervous awkward hand movements. (One thing I am quite happy with is that I am usually good at fielding questions, largely thanks to my massive overkill slide deck.)

Thinking back on it, I am quite happy with the amount of practice I’ve gotten presenting in different contexts in the lab. Public speaking has turned out to be so much more important than I expected when I took 6.UAT. I think I’ve gotten a lot better at it, and I am genuinely excited to keep improving: to keep growing in the contexts I already have experience in and to try on new contexts and get better and better. (And seeing the process as a valuable growth opportunity, rather than something awful I just have to get through, is already a massive step forward.)

This presentation in particular needed to go well. I was getting to present in front of an agency that funds our research, as well as PIs of other labs doing related and impactful work. I was representing our lab and I was representing the Institute. I also was worried, or in more accurate terms felt rather confidently, that it wasn’t supposed to be me, that this was a mistake, and that the people who know me would be expecting me to do rather poorly, or at the very least didn’t have particularly high expectations, which maybe gave me something to prove and at the very least made me rather desperately want to not disappoint those same people who had believed in me and given me the stage—and I really, really did not want them to regret believing in me. In other words, it was an opportunity and it was a big deal to me.

Like for larger group presentations, my slides were already largely prepared from previous presentations I had given in front of the lab and other coworkers, both in large- and small-group settings; I mostly just had to put the slides together into one coherent presentation, with a few updates in background information slides. This took longer than I expected but it didn’t take too long. I found myself done adjusting and adding slides the day before—an accident and a new record for me.

I had a whole half a day to sit with my slide deck and to practice (amazing!).

The presentation was to be eight minutes, with two minutes for questions. I was used to presenting this material in an hour-, at least half-hour-long presentation, so getting everything to fit was the main challenge. I practiced for several hours with my slides and my cell phone timer, interrupted only at one point by our building manager, who came by because we had mice. (Have mice—but at the moment they can’t seem to get past the inside of the hollow space behind the kitchen cabinet. The great benefit of this experience is that I now fully understand what authors like Neil Gaiman mean when they describe mice scratching inside the walls, and staying up late working is now that much spookier….)

I am very glad I practiced. My introduction, which I really did not have time for, initially took up three or four minutes—a full half of my allotted time. I cut it down to less than 30 seconds. Even then, I could never get through all of my slides, so I was forced to cut out most of the side paths and focus entirely on the main narrative. This was probably good for the project itself—the experience of cutting my presentation down showed me what I care about most within the wide scope of the project, and that the work was not weaker with more focus. By the end of a few hours I had the presentation down to a perfect and consistent eight minutes. I didn’t have a script, and I didn’t practice so much that my wording was the same each run-through, but I nailed down the verbal transitions that worked best at key moments when the audience could potentially get lost and identified specific slides that tempted me to go down juicy but time-consuming tangents side paths that would have been distracting and taken up too much time.

The actual presentation was very similar to my simulations. I sat in the same chair at the same place at our dining table, with my laptop the same distance from my face, and used my cell phone timer in the same way, and all went smoothly and on time. There were a few questions at the end, which were very easy to answer with the slides I had removed from the main narrative (and I was very happy to get an excuse to return to those slides). I got compliments afterward, and I got compliments from my direct supervisor and my PI, which is a very big deal for me. I don’t usually get that much positive feedback, and I certainly don’t expect positive feedback, so the experience made me very, very happy. It was a lovely confidence boost that spilled out into the rest of my work. The presentation itself and the audience’s interest in it renewed my excitement about my work, especially the project I presented on.

The ease of simulation, I think, is one of the primary nice benefits of giving a presentation over zoom. As an added benefit, the stage is (probably) a comfortable place in your home, and the audience is a small collection of faces in squares on your screen, rather than a crowd of people right in front of you. You can worry less about stage presence, or how you occupy space, or eye contact, or your weird hand motions, and you can focus more fully on the content of your presentation. Of course, parts of the usual challenges are still present—if you fidget, it will still be distracting; you need to make eye contact with your camera, if not the people in front of you; you still have a presence and your clothing and posture and voice still affect the audience’s experience of your presentation and perception of your work. Zoom also meant I did not need to travel for the presentation, which I thought was nice, though of course I cannot possibly know how many opportunities for “networking” connection with potential future collaborators and the human beings behind the names on my favorite papers and other amazing people who share my scientific interests I missed out on without the usual awkward cocktail hours or sitting next to someone or sharing an elevator—all experiences that I miss and look forward to having again someday in the future (along with speaking on an actual stage someday, which I do not expect to enjoy but which I am guessing will be a valuable growth experience).

Here is my advice on giving presentations:

  1. Lots of pictures, minimal text. Unless you give your audience a few seconds of silence at the start of each slide, which I have never seen in an actual presentation, they are not going to be able to divide their attention between your slide and your spoken words without missing some of one or the other. Pictures are good. Figures are good. Titles and (short) labels are good. Any other information needs to justify the time it will take to process.
  2. Provide a roadmap at the beginning of your presentation, and connect back to it as you go. One way to do this is to show a broad outline of your presentation in one of your first slides and repeat the points in the outline as slide or section titles, or echo those points verbally when you reach them. I have also seen people show their outline slide repeatedly throughout the presentation with already covered sections in grey text. I don’t like that as much. I also do not usually provide much of a roadmap and need to work on changing that.
  3. Give your slides short, informative titles that both summarize what is on the slide and provide an idea of the relevant context or where you are in the presentation. Make sure that a person who zoned out for a minute can get caught up and place themselves by looking at the current slide.
  4. When you present a figure, unless it is obvious (it probably isn’t), explain what each axis is, what each point represents, and the main takeaways of the figure. Most people don’t do this, which means that some fraction of the room might not understand the figure and might not feel comfortable asking, or at least might waste time trying to figure it out—any of which limits their ability to give feedback or engage in conversation and limits the value of your presentation both to them and to you.
  5. Know what you want to get out of the meeting, and make sure you’re getting it. Literally sit down before the meeting and write down or type what you, personally, want to get out of it. Are you pitching a project? Are you asking someone for something? Are you looking for feedback? What are your priorities? Do your planned presentation and your slide deck reflect your priorities for the presentation? If conversation strays from your goals, you need to know to redirect it, which means you need to know exactly what you want.
  6. Along the same lines, write down three or so main takeaways that you want your audience to remember. These takeaways will probably be related to your goals for the meeting. Build your narrative around those takeaways. State the takeaways explicitly—you might list them out in the end, or, especially in a shorter presentation, they might even be your roadmap slide and your title slides.
  7. Bring a sheet of paper and a pen to write down any useful feedback or questions that you want to return to after the presentation is over.
  8. If you are worried that you will need to redirect conversation, or that you won’t have enough time for everyone to deliver their feedback to you during the meeting, I have found it helpful to print out my figures and leave them around the room with pens or markers such that each person can reach at least one, preferably at least two (in case someone else already took one) copies (or even print one per person, though that is probably excessive). Mention at the start of your presentation that your audience can write any comments on these pages and return them to you at the end of the meeting; when you redirect conversation, invite people to write any unspoken feedback on the pages. Printed figures can make redirecting the conversation easier, both for you and for your audience. It can also help you get feedback from people who do not feel comfortable speaking in front of the entire group, and feedback that someone thought up after the particular topic had passed—and it gives people who are not engaged by your presentation something interesting to do that still achieves your goals.
  9. Stop occasionally to ask the audience questions or solicit questions or feedback. (Pause a slightly uncomfortably long time after you ask a question to give people time to formulate their thoughts and potentially work up the courage to speak.) If you’re looking for feedback, asking for it directly will give you a better chance of getting it. Also, asking questions helps keep your audience engaged and gives you a better idea of whether or not they understand are engaged with what you are saying. (When I was TAing 6.005 (now 6.031), I learned that it is in addition important to phrase your request for feedback or questions in an inviting, open-ended way: “what feedback or questions do you have?” rather than “do you have any questions or feedback?”)
  10. If there is something that fits naturally, it can be nice to start with or otherwise work in a relevant movie or TV clip or comic that somehow relates to your research, to make the experience more fun for everyone—and to improve your audience’s engagement with the material, make them more comfortable speaking up, and, if it’s done well, give them easier access to your key takeaways. Probably don’t do it before every single presentation, unless you want that to be your thing.

6.UAT had a lot of practice speaking assignments that you can peruse, if you’d like to try them. They are fairly varied and include a lot of different contexts—presenting with a slide deck, presenting a chalk talk (which I have not yet had to do in practice), presenting on your work, shorter persuasive pitches, presentations that are meant to connect to a lay audience, and so on.

As an aside, I have heard that acting or improv are great for improving public speaking—and one of my favorite instructors used to do theatre. I took an introductory acting class while I was at MIT, but it was absolutely not what I expected and I don’t think had much of an impact on my public speaking skills (though who knows!). One assignment I particularly remember involved all of us writhing on the floor in different directions while making loud silly sounds, literally rolling over each other and hitting the walls and rolling over each other again. The professor left the room for a long while in the middle of the exercise but we didn’t know what to do so we kept rolling. (Is there a lesson here? I don’t think there’s a lesson here.)

Some of my more corporate friends have (or had, before the pandemic) parties (I’m not kidding) where each attendee has to impromptu present (again, not kidding) on a completely unfamiliar slide deck. I don’t usually go to these parties (but I should, and I intend to when we can safely have parties again), but it seems like a great way to practice. (And how nice to look out for your friends’ public speaking skills!)

Here are some of the ways I hope to keep growing:

  1. Knowing my priorities well enough to be flexible with time, if I get less time during a meeting than I expected.
  2. Managing conversation to make sure that we are able to reach everything I prioritize.
  3. Going out of my way to practice presenting to a larger group, such as at lab meeting. Presenting in front of a larger group makes me uncomfortable, but that is precisely why I should probably pursue the experience. I usually choose one-on-one or small-group mentoring over volunteer teaching opportunities, due to the massive amount of time and work that goes into preparing a lecture—but maybe I should make a point of volunteering to teach at least one or two lectures a year, perhaps on a topic that requires minimal preparation to minimize loss of research time.
  4. Getting better at providing a visual and verbal roadmap to the audience.
  5. Practicing presenting without a slide deck.

By far, the most important thing I’ve learned about presenting is that the priority is to convey information and have a dialogue with the audience toward some goal. Everything else—how you look, if you seem unsure or if you do not exude confidence in your own work, whether or not your explanations make sense to your audience, whether or not people zone out partway through your presentation and don’t or aren’t able to check back in—is either in service of or to the detriment of the goal. It is important to keep your priorities and your audience at the forefront, ahead of your self-esteem and your ego and your expectations. That’s not an easy thing to do. Most likely, in the end, the most important thing is the work you are presenting: your job is to give it the platform it needs in order to become whatever the world needs from it.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The rest of this blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get up to 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!

Here are some things you can buy, if you see them here and you like them and you want them for yourself:

  1. My clicker, which I bought for myself and then also for my parents and for my partner. It has a nice soft texture and is pleasant to hold and easy and intuitive to use and has not failed me through multiple years of presentations. The places where I present usually have their own clicker, or an option to not use a clicker, but I like having the flexibility to move around and I quite like having my own clicker that I know I like and am familiar with and can trust not to present (hah! a pun!) me with any surprises during what is probably (by virtue of being a moment in my life) an already stressful time.
  2. My to-do list notebook, which for 2020 is pink because the pink one was on sale when I bought it. I have been keeping my to-do lists in a dedicated notebook for I think three or four years now. It is a very pleasant ritual. The notebook itself has changed from year to year, but I have finally settled on one and I think I will be buying this exact notebook from now on. I just bought my notebook for 2021. It is still shrink-wrapped and I am excited to open it on New Year’s—my own gift to myself. I might gift-wrap it. It is blue, dark blue, like the night sky. I like it very much.
  3. The Lady Astronaut series, consisting of The Calculating Stars, The Fated Sky, and The Relentless Moon. I like everything Mary Robinette Kowal writes. I had been looking forward to The Relentless Moon for a long time and was very excited to finally get to read it. It is a mystery story and it is extremely well-researched sci-fi and it is a very nice vacation (on the moon).