Text: Åke Forsberg
Pictures: Katrin Pusch, © UCMR
The first UCMR Speakers Trophy (UST) competition was held at the UCMR Day 10th of January. The focus of the competition was to find the best way to present and communicate research to a broad audience.
The first UCMR Speakers Trophy winner was decided at the UCMR Day 2013
The first UCMR Speakers Trophy (UST) competition was held at the UCMR Day 10th of January. The focus of the competition was to find the best way to present and communicate research to a broad audience. The short five minute presentations should be as pedagogic, captivating and inspiring as possible. A jury with expertise in communication skills, science and media and the audience at the meeting together decided the winner. The excellent coaching, training and advice that Jörgen Bodner provided to the participants really paid off. All four young researchers gave excellent short presentations that were highly appreciated by the jury and the audience. It really gave the audience a lot of new ideas on how to present research to a broad audience in very informative, interesting and entertaining way! Here we describe some of the more entertaining aspects of the competition!
Staffan Ling presented each participant and also invited the audience and the jury to give comments and provide scores for each presenter. He also asked very illuminating and challenging questions to both the speakers and the members of the jury.
Left: Staffan Ling
Tor Ny, professor in Medical Chemistry, Innovator, Umeå University had the task to look at the scientific content of the presentation, if it was clear, concise and appeared to be significant. Tor himself as an experienced senior researcher told the old professors in the audience that they had a lot to learn from the presentations by the young researcher. He said that now he for the first time understood what the old professors had talked about at seminars for more than 20 years.
Tommy Engman, journalist with many years experience from local and national radio, and now also with experience as a jury member in the UST competition, looked at how easy it was to follow and understand the research topic from his perspective as a journalist. He stated for one presentation that “I probably did not really understand much of this, but importantly I think I understood”.
In the front from left to right: Tor Ny, Tommy Engman, Jörgen Bodner
Jörgen Bodner (Replikskiften and Kunskapsbolaget), director, actor, highly appreciated course leader in presentation techniques at the UCMR Research School. He has had a great impact on how students and young researchers have improved their presentation skills. He has made us focus on how to present our research and communicate to the audience instead of only focusing on the scientific facts in sometimes overloaded slides.
Originally there were five brave young researcher registered for the competition, but one of them Patrik Engström that according to himself had a crush on and an emerging love affair with Chlamydia instead became a victim of his passion and came down with vomiting disease (most likely not caused by Chlamydia but perhaps by a jealous virus). Many tried to persuade him not to give up and say that he could perform between buckets but he was for some reason not quite up to it.
Christer Larsson did not perform as himself, a young promising researcher, but as the Tuberculosis bacterium (TB) that according to him was ”Unwanted and hated by everyone”. Once almost eradicated he was now back and was not impressed with how researchers tried to find drugs to get rid of him. Still, he felt that it was unfair and cowardly to attack him when he was resting in the host during periods of latency. Finally, he made the important claim that without him Tom Jones (TJ in short) would not have made his huge success as the singing bull from Wales. As TB he rescued TJ from the hard work in the coal mines. A great performance but both Staffan Ling and Tommy Engman had a hard time to distinguish between TB and TJ and that might have cost him the victory.
Munender Vodnala, a PhD student at Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics told the story about how he was doing research to find new drugs against Trypanosomas parasites that causes African sleeping sickness. He took the audience on a fantastic journey to Africa with spectacular photos. The disease is a major problem but in the future this may be solved by Munender´s research. In all possible ways he was much clearer in his presentation compared to Christer and much easier for the jury to understand. It was probably wise of him not appear as the parasite.
Sofia Österberg, asked the challenging question to the jury and audience ”To move or not to move - that’s the question”. This was not about her way of performing but more a challenging decision that the soil bacterium that she studied has to make. She presented the very complex topic on how bacteria move and swim in a convincing and simplified way that the jury actually seemed to understand and this gave her high scores. Jörgen who always has the focus on how the presenter communicates with the audience noticed that Sofia also was moving during the presentation and in her case away from the jury in the front benches. Was that really in accordance with her model on bacterial movement?
The last presenter was Sofie Ekestubbe who said that there is continuous war (Attack and Defense) going on between us (host) and the pathogenic bacteria. The bacteria are clever creatures that build small nano-machines designed to deliver toxic products into our cells to prevent us from eradicating them. These nano-machines are designed and assembled in such a clever way that they could even be viewed as “intelligent design”. Staffan Ling was not too impressed; he claimed that he had seen a similar large scale variant at Gröna Lund in Stockholm called “Free fall”, that definitely was made by humans and not by bacteria. Even though Sofie almost told us that bacteria are smarter than us (and the jury) she was still awarded first price and announced as the first winner of the UCMR Speakers Trophy.
