seleste Villalon

Senior year as an undergraduate Biomedical Engineer has seemed to be an endless number of oral presentations. Practicing communication skills as a scientist has been emphasized greatly in just about every course I’ve taken. Not only is it sufficient to be able to conduct research, acquire data and analyze results, it is also a necessary skill to be able to communicate one’s findings to others. Why are you doing your research? What methodology is being done to answer the problem definition? What does the data conclude? What are the limitations? Why is your research important? These are all aspects and questions that need to be addressed when giving presentations about one’s research.

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For Bioinstrumentation (BMEN 361), I practiced giving a presentation about the promise of a handheld confocal microscope in the surgical field to an audience of peers. In the Bioinstrumentation Lab (BMEN 361L), I practiced effectively communicating results from an experiment. For the final project in Stem Cell Engineering (BMEN 389), I had to learn how to present several different stem cell treatment approaches to neurological disorders to an audience of peers. In my Senior Biomedical Engineering Design class (BMEN 427/428), I have had to practice updating both my peers and teaching staff in a concise and coherent manner on my project’s problem definition, goals, methodology, current status, and future directions. For both my summer research internships at Johns Hopkins and UT Southwestern Medical Center, I have had to practice communicating my data as well as limitations I have encountered to other members of the lab which include post-docs, graduate students, and principal investigators. These lab meetings have also helped me practice summarizing the work of other scientists and communicating their results concisely during journal club. Johns Hopkins and UT Southwestern have also helped me learn how to give formal presentations to the department heads, professors, and other peers, as seen by Key Artifact 3a.  These classes and internships have provided me practice for my communication skills with other scientists via different scenarios.

 

Though I have gained effective communication skills when my audience consists of other scientists, my communication skills when my audience consists of non-scientists lacks effectiveness. For example, I sometimes find myself struggling to explain to my family what exactly I do in my research labs. I try to explain my research in terminology that they would understand, but I tend to accidentally keep using convoluted science terminology and concepts that are not well-received. What sometimes ends up happening is that I “dumb it down” so that they can understand. However, by doing this, some science facts may get misinterpreted due to my poor communication.

 

The research field places a strong emphasis on communication skills with other members of the science community. However, a researcher’s audience may not always be a scientific community. For example, in Speech 140, one of the speeches required me to explain the concept of induced pluripotent stem cells to an audience of non-science major freshmen (as seen by Key Artifact 3b). Through this presentation, I learned that communicating scientific research to the science community is significantly different from communicating to a non-science community. Prior to writing this speech, I was instructed by my professor to thoroughly analyze the audience and gage their interest level in my topic. Since the expected interest level of a non-scientific audience would be lower than the interest level from a scientific community, I learned to use phrases that would lure the audience to become interested. Therefore, I said things such as “Pretty cool, right?” as well as imaginary scenarios to “hook” my audience. I also learned to engage the audience by telling them exactly how these stem cells would personally affect them. 

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There is a disconnect between scientific and non-scientific communities. Information may be miscommunicated between the two populations due to poor communication skills or lack of understanding. The non-scientific public needs to be able to understand scientific data and findings that are presented to them via the media. If scientific news is not effectively communicated, then the science can be misunderstood and misinterpreted. However, this disconnect is a two-way street. Researchers also need to make a better effort of showcasing their work to the non-science community as well. As I learned when I gave my presentation in my Speech 140 class, scientists need to be able to analyze their audience and effectively communicate to their audience regardless of the audience demographics. As a researcher, it is of critical importance to be able to communicate one’s research to other scientists so that the science community can help each other progress. However, it is equally as important to be able to communicate one’s research to the non-science community, and that is unfortunately a skill that is not emphasized as much in the field. Once better communication skills between these two communities are established, the disconnect between the two will dissipate and perhaps the public and political support of science research will increase.