09
Mar
Convincing scientific talks: Presentation skills for doctoral researchers
Turn your research into a talk that truly connects: learn how to craft clear messages, design powerful slides, and deliver with confidence on stage or online.
You will train techniques in the three essential areas of convincing scientific talks:
1. Prepare Clear Content
Many scientific presentations suffer from too little clarity and too much content. The result is a lecturer running through the slides, losing the audience at the very beginning. You should instead learn to deliver a clear presentation by setting dis-tinct goals and finding vivid examples that make your talk memorable.
2. Design Proper Slides
Today's leading standard for visualization in scientific presentations is Power-Point: a powerful tool, however, often poorly used. Lecturers frequently try to re-mind themselves what they wanted to say by reading their own bullets – thereby facing the projection screen instead of their audience. With overfilled, graphically cluttered, visually incoherent slides they try to support their speech. Do better!
3. Be Convincing on Stage
With your body language and spoken word stands or falls your talk. Aside valuable content you must be able to deliver it in a convincing way that motivates your au-dience to follow you. Many great researchers miss this chance and obligation. You will give an example of your talk, receive feedback, learn from a video recording of it, and you will know how to do better, if necessary. We will train for onsite and online talks.
Content
•Prepare clear content: audience focus, take home message, etc.
•How to start and end well
•Telling a vivid story: Creating Brain Cinema
•The Six Golden Rules of Slide Design (How many words? How many slides? What background and fonts? …)
•PowerPoint tech tips (slide masters, Smart Art, etc. No full introduction)
•Body language: where to put your hands – and other questions
•Answers to your questions
Methods
Mixture of trainer input, practical exercises, participants’ presentations, and dis-cussion. Each participant will conduct a short 3-5 minutes’ presentation twice (an excerpt of a larger one), receive feedback by peers and trainer and learn from a video recording. Participants need to send in samples of own slides and their learning goals before the seminar. Also, they need to prepare for their short talk.
9 March: building 1b, SR 5 & 10 March: building 1b, SR 4b
9 + 10 March 2026, 9 am - 5:30 pm
Matthias Mayer
1.0
Doctoral researchers
Slots are limited, early registration is strongly recommended.
Other interesting events
show all events09 Feb 2026
Thesis defense: Agata Azzolin
Thesis defense: Agata Azzolin | 09 February 2026, 1:00 p.m. |
The disputation is open to the UHH university public. Title of thesis: Advances in High-Order Harmonic Sources and Applicati ...
26 Feb 2026
Supervision and Leadership for Doctoral Researchers
Dr. Imke Lode (she/her) | 26 + 27 February 2026 | Building 48f / room O1.030
Interactive hands-on workshop with exercises and scientific input, enabling the participants to supervise students in an effe ...
26 Feb 2026
Grant Proposal Writing in a Nutshell - Seminar for Early-Career Researchers
26 February 2026, 3 - 5:30 pm | Remote
Join us for our seminar "Grant Proposal Writing in a Nutshell" for early-career researchers (doctoral and postdoctoral resear ...
10 Mar 2026
Academic Writing for Doctoral Researchers - 8 Sessions
8 sessions from 10 March to 28 April 2026, 5:30 - 7:00 p.m. (Tuesdays) | Campus Bahrenfeld, Building 61 Room 116 (1st floor)
At a basic level, a PhD is about developing the skills of a professional academic researcher. However, without a set syllabus ...