About the author
Hi! My name is Martins and I am a researcher at a Swiss National Research institute Empa.
My first poster session was in Vienna, Austria and it was a disaster. I stood waiting for visitors but barely anyone came. I looked around and it seemed that everyone else is engaged in lively conversations.
Unfortunately, just like me at my first conference, many students stand by their posters alone, as if contagious, approached only by compassionate peers willing to be polite.
After the initial failures, I started digging into ways to make my poster session experience better. I envisioned the the perfect poster. One where a quick glimpse would allow visitors to get an idea about the research and its findings. Once visitors approach the author, they would they would hear a concise presentation that highlights the main findings. Then a lively conversation would follow where ideas are shared and partnerships formed.
After perfecting the approach, my experience with poster sessions has been so good that I want everyone to experience it. After all, science most often advances through collaborations and the effective posters would certainly help spark fresh ideas and form new ties.
The Poster Design Cheat Sheet summarizes the conference poster creation principles. It also includes poster design templates for different situations.
The book “Scientific Presentation Skills”
The Poster Design Cheat Sheet summarizes the advice from my book “Scientific Presentation Skills”. In the book, I present in detail each of the steps from the cheat sheet. The book is available on Amazon in any country.
As important as poster design is, alone it will not transform your experience in conferences. You also need to acquire presentation skills. The emphasis is on the word SKILLS because I believe any scientist is capable of learning to give powerful academic presentations.
In the book, you will learn how to acquire scientific presentation skills through a scientifically-proven learning approach, called Five-S presenting pyramid.
The book is available on Amazon
The Peer Recognized book series
Eventually, there will be six books in the Peer Recognized book series, each of which will focus on one of the primary academic communication skills that will help to build an academic career. As you can see in the figure, the books are arranged in a sequence that reflects the needs at the different stages in an academic career. Depending on your career stage, choose which one to read.
“Scientific Presentation Skills” is the third Peer Recognized book and you already saw what to expect from it. Here is more information about the other five books in the series:
