Clinic on Meaningful Modeling of Epidemiological Data

The 15th MMED clinic ~ June 15-26, 2026 ~ Muizenberg, Cape Town, South Africa

  1. Preparation
  2. Posters

Guidelines for poster preparation

During the first days of the Clinic, you will have an opportunity to discuss a project of your choice related to the ‘Meaningful Modeling of Epidemiological Data’ with other participants and the instructional team through the presentation of a poster. You will stand by your poster during a specified session and discuss the research presented; and engage with other poster presenters during other poster sessions.

Format

  • Posters will be secured on walls using adhesive putty or tape.
  • You do not need to print your poster on a large format printer. Printing your ‘poster’ across multiple smaller sheets of paper is absolutely fine.
  • We can print your poster for you.
    • To take advantage of this option, format your poster for printing on A1-sized paper (portrait or landscape), and submit the PDF of your poster using this form by 17:00 SAST on Monday 8 June.
    • There is no charge for printing (restricted to one A1 poster per participant).
  • Even if you print your poster ahead of time, please email an electronic copy of your poster to posters@ici3d.org before the start of the Clinic.

Structure

You can structure your poster as you prefer, and you should feel free to use materials from presentations you have previously given. We recommend including the following content:

Title – Include the title of your poster, your name, your affiliation, and names and affiliations of any co-authors.

Introduction/background - Provide the audience with enough information to understand the context of your research. Why is it important, and what earlier studies set the stage for your work?

Question – Explicitly state the question(s) your research addresses.

Approach – Explain to the audience how you addressed or plan to address the question. What methods will you use? What is the basic format of the model, and what tools will you use to implement it? What data will you use? How were/are the data collected and why are they relevant? How will you use the data?

Findings (if you are presenting a previous project or partially completed project) – What have you found? What is your current understanding/interpretation of your findings? How confident are you in your findings, and why?

Expectations (if you are presenting a planned project) – What do you expect to find? Outlining your a priori expectations before completing a project is useful: if your findings contradict your expectations, you will have to consider why, and this will show you what you really learned from your research.

Conclusions (if you are presenting a previous project or partially completed project) - What did you learn from your research? Do your findings have implications for disease prevention or disease control efforts? What are these implications?

Directions - Where are you headed next? Are there any particular aspects of your project on which you would like feedback?

  • If you are presenting a planned project: Are there any aspects of what you have proposed that you find particularly daunting and would like us to address during the Clinic? If you know what type of data you would like to use for the project but are not sure where to find them, do raise this as other participants may have ideas about data sources.

  • If you are presenting a current project: Have you gotten stuck anywhere or do you need to learn any particular methods?

  • If you are presenting a previous project: What are you working on now? What will be most useful to you in the coming weeks?

Additional guidelines

  • There are many online sources describing how to design and structure the contents of your poster. This site is a good starting point. You may also want to consider using the ‘better poster’ format described in this video.
  • Do not use a font size below 24 pt anywhere on your poster.
  • Be sure to attribute any figures or photographs taken from other sources (e.g., provide the author, year, and source for figures borrowed from published works).
  • Clearly label the axes on all figures.
  • Explain in words any equations you show.
  • Diagrams often complement equations nicely to give a conceptual overview of a model.
  • Keep your poster simple. Choose a few colors and use them consistently across sections. Avoid long chunks of text.
  • Save your poster as a PDF to guarantee you will be able to open the file without formatting problems.