Communicating Interdisciplinary Science: Who are your audience?
At a CORE meeting earlier this month, I had the opportunity practice the first talk I was going to give on my thesis research. As a first year graduate student, presenting the work I'd done was a little daunting, because two quarters in, I did not have a lot of results to share. When comparing my presentation to the vast majority of other research talks I'd ever attended, it seemed to me that a more accomplished scientist could distill my progress so far into work that could have been completed in a couple of days - work that took me months. My insecurities may have been unnecessary, but it they did make me wonder how many researchers hold back from communicating new research or preliminary results for similar reasons.
Practicing this talk in a supportive environment of my peers helped alleviate my fears. In addition to giving me pointers on ways to make my slides more appealing, those at the meeting helped me determine how to present my research given the audience. I left the meeting with a long list of edits to consider that I have no doubt made my talk significantly better.
I gave the revised version of this talk at the California Student Chapter Conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy. Meeting attendees all came from marine mammal research programs, while those who had listened to my practice talk at CORE had primarily oceanographic backgrounds. My research falls somewhere in the middle: I was presenting chlorophyll data collected from miniaturized tags deployed on migrating northern elephant seals. For me, considering how a listener would gain the most from my talk was essential. For oceanographers, which big brown creatures are the elephant seals and where do they go? For marine mammalogists, how do you measure chlorophyll using fluorometry and what do the data tell us?
The next time I present this work will be to a more general marine community, requiring another reevaluation of which points to stress within a given time limit to leave listeners with a lasting impression. Practicing this skill I think is especially important given the large amount of interdisciplinary research emerging and the need to communicate to diverse audiences, from scientists to the general public to policy makers, for our research to have an impact.
