A Talk on Abstracts—and an Interesting Opinion Piece

Greetings again. I hope that all is going well for you. As usual, things are going busily for me. In addition to my usual work, my activities this past week included giving a talk remotely. Despite being busy, I did some interesting reading. Let me say more.

On Tuesday I gave a talk at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where I had been a student. The talk, which was for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, was on writing abstracts. It was in a course titled Effective Science Communication.

Although Johns Hopkins University and my university are about 1500 miles (2400 kilometers) from each other, I gave this talk without leaving my desk—and without using special technology. Here’s how.

Before class, I emailed my PowerPoint presentation to Liz, the course organizer. Then, at the start of class, Liz called me on her mobile phone, which had been connected to speakers. I gave my talk by phone, and Liz advanced the slides. Afterward, I could hear and answer questions.

This approach was simple and reliable. I look forward to using it next month for my other talk in the course.

Some interesting reading that I did this week was a short opinion article titled “Senior Scientists Should Be Writing”. This article was in the magazine The Scientist.

The article’s authors note that often an early-career team member does the actual writing of a scientific paper, with the senior scientist providing mentorship. The authors argue that senior scientists also should do more writing of their own, in part because writing aids thinking.

Until the next post—

Barbara