Communicate your Research: an interdisciplinary experience for PhD students

Research implies communication. It makes no sense to passionately and effortfully explore new areas of knowledge and science, but then keep it for yourself. For this reason, throughout your PhD training, you have participated in seminars on how to communicate with your peers, how to disseminate your research internationally, how to have an impact in your research domain.

However, can you communicate your research to a broader audience, to people who know very little about your specific research topic or even know very little about research in general? It is a challenging task, but again a crucial one. When seeking funding for your research, or searching for a job outside academia, or aiming to share your findings with the general public you have to be able to convey your research aims and ideas in simple words, concisely and effectively.

The University of Trento has conceived a new format for training your Research Communication skills that will be held on two separate afternoon: on June 22nd and July 14th.

First afternoon (22 June 2023)
The first afternoon aims to provide a short introduction to the importance of research communication. Professors and researchers of the University of Trento will take the challenge to describe their research in 5 minutes. Which question do they address, how do they do it, which are the implications of their research for science and society. All presentations will be in English and they will be held in the Auditorium at Palazzo Paolo Prodi.

Second afternoon (14 July 2023)
During the second afternoon, PhD students will be divided into small groups (10-12 people), making sure that each group comprises students from different PhD programs. Each student will present his/her research in 5 minutes and will receive feedback from the other students in the class as well as from a tutor with research communication experience. Each group of students can then select a representative that will repeat the 5-minute presentation in a plenary session at the end of the afternoon. The afternoon will conclude with more informal exchange.

You can hear the description of this novel initiative from Prof. Francesco Pavani (Rector’s Delegate for PhD programs) and Prof. Stefano Oss (Rector’s Delegate for Research Communication) in a 10-minutes webinar on the link below.

• learn how to communicate your work to people with a different research background, in an informal context.
• get to know colleagues from other PhD programs within the University of Trento.