1. Presenting Your Proposal BIOS 587 Mary Purugganan, Ph. D
Presenting Your Proposal BIOS Mary Purugganan, Ph.D. Cain Project January 28, 2005

2. Goals for session
Content
Design
Delivery
Q&A
Samples

3. Your Presentations Feb 4 8 minutes (5 min Q&A)
Apr 22, minutes (10 min Q&A)

4. Content Consider your audience
State problem / hypothesis clearly & early
Include significance
Keep background relevant
State aims and how experiments will address aims
What, why, how
Explain methods when appropriate
Plan a conclusion

5. Purpose of visual aids
Create a slide show with storyboards, not a script
Use the slide show...
to organize content
to create a hierarchy

6. Suggested slide content
Title: as concrete as possible
Problem / hypothesis
Significance / background
Specific Aim (x3)
State aim
Provide rationale
Propose experiments
Predict results / interpretation
Conclusion

7. Designing Your Slides To select a design, ask yourself:
What professional image do I want to project?
In what type of room will I give my talk?
Well-lit room: use light background / dark text and visuals
Dimly-lit room: use dark background / light text and visuals

8. Project a clear font Serif fonts Sans serif fonts
Times New Roman, et al.
Easy to read in printed documents
Sans serif fonts
Arial, Helvetica, et al.
Easy to see projected across the room

9. Choose color carefully
Be aware that colors of similar intensities do not have high enough contrast to be easily distinguished on a slide. For example, many speakers like blue backgrounds, and they choose red to attact attention or highlight a point. Look, however, at how much higher contrast a light blue has compared with red. The red is difficult to see.

10. Choose color carefully
“Gradient fill” allows you to change color
Down
Across
Diagonally
From the corner
If you like to use a gradient fill for your background, be careful to choose two colors for your gradient that are somewhat similar in brightness. For example, here, I have medium blue and black. You see that the contrast is almost lost in the medium blue section and high in the black. If I had chosen a light blue, I could not have found a text color that would have looked clear across all variations of the gradient.

11. Use grammatical parallelism
Not Parallel:
Lyse cells in buffer
5 minutes in centrifuge
Supernatant is removed
Parallel:
Centrifuge for 5 minutes
Remove supernatant
Readers comprehend more quickly when lists are parallel… LYSE, CENTRIFUGE, and REMOVE are all verbs that make these points easy to scan and understand. The top list is clumsy and requies some synthesis to understand.

12. Simplify & draw attention
If you have a concept to illustrate that is part of a bigger whole, such as an enzyme in a pathway, draw your audience’s eye to the area of interest using a red box. This focuses audience attention and is less distracting than a laser pointer.

13. Delivery Stance Gestures Eye contact Voice quality Body language
Handling notes
Gestures
Eye contact
Voice quality
Volume
Pace

14. Handling questions LISTEN Repeat or rephrase Watch body language
Don’t bluff

15. Sample Slides and Videoclips