Learn With Us

Build the skills to support your will to collaborate! This participatory arts practices-based workshop will help participants develop their abilities to listen deeply, express themselves effectively, interact personally, directly, spontaneously, and responsively, and bridge divides that can prevent us from communicating and collaborating.

Explore the value of playful improvisation and serious games to help you establish more confident, productive, and effective connections with all of your collaborators at work and in life.

Build muscles of personal resilience and imaginative innovation. If you’ve experienced the value of improvisation in our Art of Yes! workshop or as part of our graduate class in Communicating Science, we know you’ll be interested in continuing to become more spontaneous, responsive, and aware. This series is for you!

Many science and industry professionals have been told to “develop your elevator pitch.” This workshop provides the tools to prepare for brief and compelling interactions that may occur on an elevator, in a media interview, or anywhere.

Participants in this workshop put the lessons and tools learned in “Distilling Your Message” into practice with mock media interviews. Interviews are video recorded so that interviewees can learn from performances.

Are you comfortable with introduction, methods, results, and discussion—but not with essays, op-eds, blogs, magazine writing, and letters to editors? Participants in this hands-on workshop will explore the components of writing for the public and will practice translating technical and highly specialized material into pieces that are accessible to the wider world.

If you can explain your research to a 4-year-old, you'll be able to explain it to anyone. In this workshop, we challenge you to get your research into 29 pages—with only a few sentences per page—as a picture book for young children. 

Stories that we tell about ourselves, our missions, and our community shape how we understand the past and what we think is possible to achieve. For collaborative leaders, stories help connect the members of an organization with a common understanding of purpose. Strengthen your story skills in this engaging workshop. 

Do you panic at the thought of explaining your work to a journalist? Have you had an interaction with a reporter that left you feeling as if you had failed to communicate? This workshop provides helpful tips for researchers whose work gets the attention of the media.

What are the steps that occur between your lab or field research and the story that shows up in the newspaper? How can you maximize clarity and accuracy and minimize errors and misunderstandings? This workshop explains the process of getting research findings out of the lab, office, or field and into the greater world.

You've got data. In the digital age, you perhaps have LOTS of data! And it means something to you. But how do you best let others see what it means? In this workshop, participants practice using data summary and visualization methodologies by walking through a case study with the instructor and then practicing steps on their own data.

Cluttered slides, sloppy figures, tiny type font: don’t let your presentation design prevent effective communication! This workshop provides tips and tricks on user experiences, establishing a strong hierarchy, typeface selection, data visualization, and giving presentations.

Twitter and Instagram provide opportunities and challenges for science communication and outreach. This workshop will introduce you to the basics of Twitter and Instagram and explore the ways these platforms can be used to network with other scientists and communicate with the public. 

It is said that the thought of public speaking is more frightening to many people than death. In this workshop participants use role-play and improvisation to develop the self-confidence and audience awareness required to deliver presentations that have memorable impact. 

Understanding the perspectives of others is increasingly important in our world, and 85 percent of job success comes from well-developed soft skills. The ability to understand and empathize with others is often seen to be the most valuable of these skills. In this participatory workshop you will learn approaches to authentic listening, transformational empathy, understanding others’ perspectives, and building trust.

Leadership presence, like stage presence, isn’t all about talent. It is about developing a set of skills that result in increased connection with your team and a sense of competence that builds trust and influence with others. This participatory workshop will help you develop presence as a leader, including considerations of behavioral impact, organizational impact, visual impact, and vocal impact.

It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Almost 93 percent of human communication is non-verbal. Join us in developing more effective non-verbal communication skills – including tone of voice, physical orientation and environment, and body language.

In this workshop we’ll help you learn to use the gift of your voice as fully and expressively as possible. This workshop will introduce you to approaches to warming up your voice and articulators and improving your breath support, refining your articulation, and helping you connect emotionally and intellectually with the full range of your voice and speech in a variety of situations. 

Social media provides a way for graduate students, early career scientists, and others to network, do outreach, and raise the profile of their work with peers, potential collaborators, and employers. In this workshop, we will explore various strategies for creating a consistent profile across multiple social media platforms, blogging about your work, and having an engaging professional website. 

This initiative begins with a full-day Collaboration Incubator for 10 scientists and 10 artists, extends through the further development of several of the artist-scientist collaborations that emerge from the incubator, and culminates in performances and exhibitions of the resulting arts pieces that can help deliver innovative material to a variety of publics relative to broader impacts.

Communicating to a Public Audience for scientists, engineers, and professional communicators: The Art of Yes! (nine hours), Distilling Your Message (three hours), Writing for a Public Audience (six hours). Eighteen contact hours: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Personal Presence and Audience Awareness for researchers and scholars: The Art of Yes! (nine hours), Distilling Your Message (three hours), Effective Presentations (six hours). Eighteen contact hours: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. 

Networking Skills for industry and business professionals: The Art of Yes! (nine hours), Distilling Your Message (three hours), Leadership Presence (six hours). 18 contact hours: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Communicating with those outside your field is very different from a scientific conference presentation. Let us help your research team develop engaging and informative approaches to educating your target audiences and spreading the good word about your research findings—and perhaps more importantly, approaches to hearing what your target audiences have to say. Town meetings? School visits? Planning sessions with community members? The common denominator is clear and engaging communication.  

Are you comfortable with your ability to communicate person-to-person but struggling with how to do your best in the age of Zoom meetings, interviews, conferences, and outreach? We can help! Our focus is always on communication that is personal, direct, spontaneous, and responsive—and we can teach you adaptations for that when you’re communicating with people in small boxes on a screen.

Center faculty can help you communicate your research through compelling videos, podcasts, and other forms of asynchronous oral communication. With advances in digital technology, you may be closer than you think to being able to post some great video abstracts on your website! Let us help you make this form of communication as effective as possible.

Consider including financial support for GRAD 5144, Communicating Science, in your training grant proposals or work with us to develop curriculum and training plans and materials tailored to your research team. Effective community engagement and communication skills are essential to successful research careers; be sure your students and post-docs have the opportunities they need to develop and practice such skills.

If you include the development of educational materials for target audiences in a grant proposal, we’re happy to provide guidance as you translate your research into language that your audience can understand and appreciate. This could include flyers, brochures, booklets, books, posters, and other materials. With help from University Libraries services that support campus teaching and learning, publication, and outreach, your work can be made widely available in open access educational materials with Creative Commons licensing.

Have you always thought your research would make a great topic for a children’s book? It probably would! We can help guide you through the process of brainstorming, developing storylines, writing and revising, finding collaborators to illustrate your ideas, creating backmatter, and finding venues for sharing your work with children.