“Communicating research is to be part of something bigger”

Congrats, what does it mean for you to win?

Fredrik Heiding: The victory means a lot, especially since there were so many good pitches participating. 

Deniz Yildiz: Winning something like an award is an opportunity for the field to get recognition. A personal win translates into a collective win for the research field which could lead to more funding and collaborations. These are the game changers for new technologies and solutions to develop. 

Many feel it is hard to communicate their science, what is important when you do a presentation?

Fredrik Heiding: I think simplification is very important. It is easy to forget how deep we are in our own bubble of research and it takes effort to break down the message so that anyone can understand it. For me, the most important thing is to make sure that the message will be understood by the audience. 

Deniz Yildiz:  Being in the time of digitized meetings, we see that better techniques give us a much stronger hand than our intuition about the audience. It seems that visual tools and sound quality have become the most important elements of presentations. Having said that being able to convey one's own personal passion about the research work and distilled comprehension of the research problems is the strongest hand one can have. 

Is it important to be able to communicate your work – how does it help in your research?

Fredrik Heiding: I believe communication is essential for research, both with other researchers and society. The hard part about communication is to adapt it to the audience. If the research can be used to help people we have an obligation to communicate the benefits so they are understood. We must also be able to communicate the benefits of the research to investors and financiers in order to maintain the funding needed to keep the research alive.

Deniz Yildiz: Communicating our work is the moment where we get the opportunity to be a part of something bigger than ourselves and our research. Research is paid by the people and done for the people. Keeping this in mind, communicating research, in a way, is the pay-back time. Preparing to communicate research findings gives us an opportunity to distill our own understanding. fundamental knowledge of the field settles even more while writing an article and giving a presentation.

Here you can watch the presentations:

Fredrik Heiding: youtu.be/vVKXVIQcSAc

Deniz Yildiz: youtu.be/lL1we9Azp9Y