A good poster allows us to communicate our research quickly and clearly. A poor poster will put off our intended audience. So how do we make our poster clear, impactful AND tell everyone what we know? To start we will evaluate a series of posters in order to decide what works which of them are clear, engage us with their research and memorable. We will also examine two major design styles to see what will work for us and our research. We will look at further techniques for poster design and presentation and discuss how to tailor this to your research area. PowerPoint is one of the simpler methods of Poster design and is therefore the package that we will be suggesting you use. If you are unfamiliar with PowerPoint or want to use another software package, then you will need to attend an IT Services training course.

YouTube: Research Poster Design - YouTube

This workshop will help PGRs think of visualisation methods as a writing aid and a way to switch from writing to “seeing” and “creating” to plan and write for their PhD. This workshop will introduce participants to strategies that can help them visualise, summarise, or express their research using process diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps and timelines. Such visual communication skills can effectively communicate complex research to a general audience and help visualise extensive research projects, academic posters, and other verbo-visual presentations.

Visualisation can also be helpful as a mental exercise. Beyond the above idea of visual communication of research, this workshop can explore ways of visualising goals to feel empowered or plan better. The goal of this workshop is to help the research shift into a different mode of thinking to think of their research in a fresh way, to add to their repertoire of tools for writing and planning and reinforce the idea that their PhD experience is also one of creation and innovation and they have many different avenues available to explore their areas and expertise.

This workshop is intended for academics who would like to think about communicating their research to non-academic audiences and are wondering where to start. The workshop will focus on some typical pieces they may need to write. These include press releases, op-eds (and pitching op-eds), and press kits in case of larger projects. The goal of the workshop is to encourage PGRs to think of how they can publicise their work and why this is important. And then to give them some tools to widen their audiences and be well-prepared to write short articles, blog posts or press releases. Delivered by an ex-journalist and political cartoonist and current blog writer.