Project Presentation Guidelines

Project presentations

• You will be held to a strict 10-minute (maximum) time limit.
  • There will be time for questions afterward.
• Do not use a font size below 16pts anywhere on your slides.
  • Most of your fonts should be larger
• Be sure to attribute any figures or photographs taken from outside sources (eg, give the author, year, and source for figures borrowed from published papers).
• Decide who will present on which parts of your group project.
• Practice your talk to ensure that you know what points you want to get across on each slide and that the material you are presenting fits within the time limit.
  • Be ready: we are all very eager to hear what you have to say, and to keep the session on schedule.
• Explain in words any equations you choose to show.
• Diagrams can be a useful substitute for or supplement to equations. Build up complex diagrams piece by piece so your audience can follow along.
• Keep your slides simple. Choose a few colors and use them consistently across slides. Avoid long chunks of text.
• Clearly label the axes on all figures.
• Save your presentation as a PDF to guarantee that you will able to open the file without formatting problems.
• Upload your presentation to projectPresentations folder of the MMEDparticipants repository

Structure

You can structure your presentation however you like. We recommend including the following material:

Title slide – Include the title of your talk, names and affiliations for all group members, the date you are presenting, and an indication of the forum where you are presenting (ie, 2015 Clinic on the Meaningful Modeling of Epidemiological Data).

Introduction/background (1-2 slides) – Give the audience 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 or questions you will be addressing in the talk.

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

Expectations and progress – What did you expect to find when you set out? What have you done so far, and have your findings to date been consistent with your expectations, or have you had to revise your thinking about the problem?

Conclusions so far – What have you learned so far? Do your findings have implications for disease prevention or control efforts? What are these implications?

Next steps (1-3 slides) – Where are you headed next? Are there any particular aspects of your project on which you would like feedback? Are there any aspects of what you’ve proposed that you find particularly daunting, or have you gotten stuck anywhere that others may be able to help with?

Goals (1 slide) – What are your concrete goals for accomplishments that will be included on your final report (due Aug 1)?