Up-and-coming biomed postdocs come to BU to learn how to pitch their discoveries
By Patrick L. Kennedy
A diverse array of the nation’s most promising young biomedical engineers converged on Boston University this fall for the annual Rising Stars in Engineering in Health conference, where they learned soft skills they can use to land jobs and funding as they seek to turn their remarkable research into real-life solutions. The conference was hosted by BU’s Biomedical Engineering (BME) department, in co-sponsorship with the BME departments of Columbia University, Cornell University, and Johns Hopkins University.
“These 20 postdocs are candidates of such promise that we want to be on their radar,” says BME Professor and Chair John A. White, speaking for himself as well as the other three sponsoring institutions’ BME chairs, who were also in attendance at the two-day event, held in the Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering.
“And, we’re trying to help them set themselves up for success,” White says, by imparting lessons that the postdoctoral researchers didn’t learn in their regular curricula. “For example, how to negotiate a job offer; how to give a presentation to an audience of non-specialists and get them excited about their work.”
Importantly, the Rising Stars hailed from a variety of subfields within biomedical engineering as well as from a range of racial, ethnic, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
“We’ve embedded in our ethos a commitment to engineering in service to society,” said Dean ad interim Elise Morgan (ME, MSE, BME) in her opening remarks. “Our purpose is to create opportunities for all by enabling people to live healthier, more productive, more connected and fulfilling lives through innovation—and when I say opportunities for all, I mean all, recognizing that technological progress isn’t progress if it’s not enabling for and welcoming to everyone.”
“We’re also in a university that from its inception almost 200 years ago has been open to people of all genders, races, and religions,” added Morgan, who is also the Maysarah K. Sukkar Professor of Engineering Design and Innovation. “That’s a guiding principle we’ve kept with us, and we’re committed to hiring and supporting faculty who are not only outstanding researchers but also outstanding role models and mentors for a diverse student body.”
Like lightning
The centerpiece of the conference was a chance for the Rising Stars to hone their five-minute “lightning talks,” pithy presentations that convey to listeners what the researchers do and why it’s important.
“They’re invariably excellent researchers, but they don’t necessarily know how to make the pitch to someone who isn’t directly in their field,” says White. “Their initial presentations are technically tour-de-forces, but they’re way too detailed. They need to explain the context of their work and how it could improve human health.”
Sridevi Sarma, a BME professor and vice dean of graduate education at Johns Hopkins, gave the postdocs a crash course in presenting, using her own research pitch as an example.
“I’m in computational neuroscience—I love the math,” Sarma said. “I have to suppress the math when I talk to a general audience. I try to explain the research at an intuitive level as opposed to a mathematical level.”
Sarma opens her own talk and slideshow with the story of Olympic runner Florence “FloJo” Joyner, who received a false negative in a test for epilepsy, never received treatment, and died. Turns out, misdiagnosis is quite prevalent. But Sarma’s group, she explained, has figured out how to compute a biomarker for epilepsy from EEG data, dramatically reducing the risk of misdiagnosis.
Without getting into the math or even burdening listeners with the name of the biomarker, “I tried to give you the flavor of the innovation,” Sarma said. “The goal is, in just a few minutes, you should be able to tell your families, even your 10-year-old niece, what you do—and their reaction should be: Wow!”
Why a 10-year-old? Because the same skills used in crafting a punchy “lightning talk” apply to other communication tasks for academics, Sarma said. Even in a 45-minute “job talk,” when a faculty candidate presents their research to an audience of prospective colleagues, “You still have to hit those points—highlight the significance of your work, state the problem, state your solution, and show evidence your solution works. You still have to be very careful about jargon—faculty meet candidates all the time that are not in their field.”
“This transfers to grant writing,” Sarma added, especially to the “specific aims” page of a grant proposal. “That one-page real estate is so precious.”
Quick learners
Following Sarma’s lecture, attendees broke into small groups, in which postdocs presented the five-minute audio slideshows they had prepared before the conference. Oftentimes, these were blizzards of information without a clear narrative. Faculty mentors spent the next hour picking apart the presentations, pruning details, and helping the postdocs make sure their message shined through.
For example, during her pre-recorded lightning talk, Pu-Ting Dong (ENG’20) showed one eye-catching slide that was a riot of color, but the significance of the picture eluded everyone in the room—a room full of accomplished biomedical engineers. Then, as the group parsed the presentation more carefully afterwards, someone asked a question about that slide.
“I should make myself clear,” Dong responded. “This is a side-by-side comparison between the traditional approach to imaging bacteria, and our approach. It’s a day-and-night difference!”
“The way you just said that was perfect,” said Grace McIlvain, assistant professor at Columbia. “You had the enthusiasm in your voice that you didn’t have in the recording.”
The next day, the postdocs presented their streamlined talks, incorporating mentors’ feedback. “They give a much better talk the second time,” says White. “Because they’re so smart—they’re really quick learners.”
“It was a pleasure to meet so many young people with dynamic new approaches to biomedical research,” says event co-organizer Professor Catherine Klapperich (BME, MSE, ME). “It was an energizing experience for the Stars and the faculty mentors alike.”
Dong concurs. “This conference is a great networking opportunity,” she says. “To learn about the research of the other [Stars] creates further opportunities for future collaboration.”
“One of the biggest advantages to this is meeting people at the same stage as you,” says Kayla Wolf, a Rising Stars alum who is now a Cornell assistant professor. “It was invaluable getting to ask those nitty-gritty questions, and seeing that we’re all in this together.”
Photos by Mike Spencer