The goal of this workshop is to provide participants with a grounding in some key transferrable competencies for their PhD research and beyond. The over-riding principle of this training is awareness-raising: to develop a conceptual framework to understand and deal with some of the common challenges that arise during one’s PhD, and to acquire a set of practical tools and methods that are immediately applicable in the participants’ working environment. Another main goal of this workshop is cohort-building, to help establish a cohesive group identity among the participants, as a basis for collaboration during their PhD.

Dates: 21^th and 22^th of October, full-day

Venue: TBD

Target group: Trainees and 1^st year PhD students

Available places: 30

Training content:

Cohort Building

A key goal of this workshop is to form group identity and cohesion for productive collaboration during the participants’ PhD and beyond. We will run presentation exercises and group tasks to encourage participants to interact and get to know each other.

Core communication skills

We will explore some essential aspects that are common to many science communication channels, including thinking about the audience, defining the core message, and justifying our research. This module will also touch on aspects of interpersonal communication, working with my supervisor, and giving and receiving feedback.

Time management

How do you plan your day so you work effectively? How do you prioritise your tasks so you get the important things done first? Participants will learn simple tools that will help them be more efficient.

Project and task management

Setting realistic goals requires practice. Participants will be introduced to a framework that simplifies project and task management, and will discover digital helpers to manage themselves and collaborate better.

Participants will develop a deeper understanding of the structure of scientific papers, with a renewed focus on the purpose of each section and the connections between them. They will gain a global framework for conceptualizing the entire publishing process, how to create an expectation in the reader and then deliver on that expectation, and how to make the qualitative jump from a passive scientific account to an active scientific argument. We will then apply this knowledge to the practical task of constructing a scientific manuscript from scratch. This training workshop is highly interactive with extensive elements of partner work, exercises and group discussion, and a special emphasis on sharing and learning from participants’ own expertise and experience. To increase applicability, we work with real-life cases from the participants.

Trainer: Dr. Gavin Lucas

Gavin is the director of The Paper Mill, is a scientist with 14 years of experience as a biomedical researcher, and 11 years of experience as an academic author’s editor, consultant and trainer. In addition to his own solid track-record as a publishing scientist on national, European and international research projects, as an academic author’s editor and consultant, he has helped plan, critique, and polish over 250 original scientific articles for dozens of institutes in diverse fields, as well as numerous FP7 and H2020 proposals. He also has extensive experience as a trainer in scientific writing and other topics and provides consultancy on scientific productivity at academic institutes and agencies.

Trainer: Dr. Tobias Maier

Tobias Maier is head of the Seminars Area at the National Institute for Science Communication in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has a PhD in biochemistry and a ten-year track record in academic research, funding acquisition, and publishing in high impact journals such as cell or science. He has extensive experience as a trainer at workshops for scientists on diverse topics, including scientific writing, online science communication, career development, leadership, and other transferable skills.

Registration will open in June