Eight postdoctoral and graduate students in The Graduate School’s Research Communication Training Program presented their work Thursday afternoon at Seven Minutes of Scholarship: An Interdisciplinary Symposium.

The event, hosted in Norris University Center’s Wildcat Room, served as the students’ final presentation in RCTP. The 10-week program for graduate and postdoctoral students is designed to enhance their confidence and clarity in public communication.

“The impact of research will be limited if it can’t be translated to a broad audience,” said RCTP Instructional Coordinator Kiki Zissimopoulos.

At the event, the eight participants each had seven minutes to present their research to a non-expert audience. 

Students presented on a range of topics, including how to make silicone recyclable, the optimum way to allocate scarce resources and how a missing gene led to the identification of a previously unrecognized disease.

“Because we draw from all areas of research at Northwestern, participants get to meet people that they might not otherwise meet,” Zissimopoulos said. “It’s a really nice way to create community.”

Second-year cognitive psychology Ph.D. student Danielle Rothschild Doyle presented her research on spatial thinking. Higher spatial thinking ability is related to higher skill level in STEM and medical thinking, Rothschild Doyle said. Her research focuses on the relationship between spatial ability and prosthetics and orthotics.

Part of Rothschild Doyle’s project includes assessing students in a master’s program at Northwestern’s Prosthetics-Orthotics Center at the Feinberg School of Medicine to evaluate their skill in tasks including mental rotation and cross-sectioning. 

Rothschild Doyle said she hopes the project will aid in understanding the relationship between these spatial thinking skills and prosthetics and orthotics, identify which skills are relevant for this field and explore how students’ spatial ability transforms throughout the program.

Rothschild Doyle said her project requires a lot of background knowledge, which took practice to condense and present in the symposium’s short seven minute time frame.

“Until today, every practice was at least 30 seconds over,” Rothschild said. “Trying to fit everything I wanted to say in the time that I was allotted was stressful.”

Third-year Kellogg Ph.D. student Nicolas Min presented on the impact of data curation for non-data-savvy companies. 

He explained how private companies are contracted for public construction jobs via the public procurement market, where companies bid to work on the project and the company that offers the lowest bidding price gets contracted to do the construction. Each company’s bidding price is determined by the unit price they can offer on the required material.

Min said his research found that data-savvy companies — those who can sort through data files regarding unit prices using technology — tend to bid close to each other, while non data-savvy companies — those who must sort through data files manually — tend to bid more variably because they have a harder time determining the lowest bid they can offer.

In his project, Min curated unwieldy data into a more accessible format so that the non-data-savvy companies could better understand the data and suggest a bid price high enough to cover their costs but low enough to win a bid.

“Without data curation, public data has little value,” Min said during his presentation. “Only with data curation can we turn public data into public value.”

Dr. Vicky Kalogera and Michelle Paulsen co-founded RCTP in 2012 as “Ready, Set, Go.” This program, rebranded in 2019, is made possible by a National Science Foundation grant.

The program has hosted this symposium annually since its founding.

Both Min and Rothschild Doyle said participating in the symposium challenged them to avoid using research-related jargon and instead present their technical work in more understandable terms.

Rothschild Doyle added that she wanted to get experience talking about her research early on in her career to aid her throughout the remainder of her five-year program.

“People who tell me that they liked my talk have been really great because that is validating,” Rothschild Doyle said. “This is the first time I’ve publicly talked about this project, so this is exciting to have that response and get to get that information out there.”

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