A group of 16 people stand together for a group photo on a stage. Above them is a screen with the Center for Communicating Science logo.
Center for Communicating Science director Patty Raun (back row, far right) poses with some of the National Research Traineeship graduate students who participated in the 7-week Communicating Research program Raun developed. Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

Ten graduate students from across the United States delivered short and engaging research talks as part of a “mini Nutshell Games” event at the annual meeting of National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Traineeship (NRT) programs, this year hosted by Virginia Tech October 17-October 19. 

A woman with medium-length brown hair, a white shirt, and black pants speaks into a microphone on a small stage. Her free hand is raised.
Miriam Tariq, who studies sustainable systems engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, introduced her water availability and access research with a talk titled “Barriers to Access: Understanding Levers to Improve Water Services.” Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

    The NRT Nutshell Talks were the culmination of a 7-week Communicating Research workshop series developed and taught by Virginia Tech’s Center for Communicating Science director Patty Raun. The Nutshell Talks evening was based on the center’s annual graduate student competition, the Nutshell Games, in which student presenters have only 90 seconds to explain their research to a public audience. In the NRT conference version, student talks were approximately 3 minutes.

A woman with medium-length brunette hair, a white short-sleeve shirt, and a long black skirt speaks into a microphone on a small stage.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Bioinformatics and Computational Biology + Chemical Engineering graduate student Sarah Weintraub used her Nutshell Talk “Yeasts for Sustainable Energy” to explain the potential for biofuels to replace fossil fuels. Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

   Twenty graduate student researchers from funded NRTs across the country were selected in August from a pool of 80 applicants to participate in the Communicating Research program. Students participated in weekly 3-hour online interactive sessions with Raun between August 30 and October 18, with an in-person dress rehearsal for the ten Nutshell presenters at the conference venue. 

A Black woman wearing a yellow shirt and patterned pants speaks into a microphone on a small stage.
Kris-An Hinds, from University of South Florida’s STRONG Coasts program and the Department of Applied Anthropology, shared the ups and downs of her relationship with her research in “Coastal Communities & the Environment: A One Part Anthology.” Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

  In addition, Raun provided a 90-minute in-person workshop for 90 graduate student participants at the conference, “Building bridges for collaboration: a participatory student workshop in communicating science.” Center associate director Carrie Kroehler facilitated a conference workshop for graduate student online participants, “Communicating research: an introduction to improvisation for scientists.”

A man with short blonde hair, a striped shirt, and black pants speaks into a microphone on a small stage.
“What Is It Like to Be a Quantum Particle?” Brandon Barton from the Carr Complexity Science Group at the Colorado School of Mines helped the audience imagine their way into the world of quantum many-body physics. Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

    The Nutshell Talks were an integral part of the NRT conference, which brings together principal investigators and graduate students from NSF-funded NRTs to build networks and share best practices in interdisciplinary graduate education. This year’s meeting at Virginia Tech, the largest NRT annual meeting to date and the first to be held in hybrid format, included 246 participants who traveled to campus and another 200 online participants.

A woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, a striped shirt, and black pants speaks into a microphone on a small stage.
From the University of California, Los Angeles, LINDA Lab @ Luskin Center for Innovation graduate student Morgan Rogers used her encounters with Fluffy the overheated dog to explain her urban planning research in a talk titled “Cool by Design: Planning for Heat.” Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

    The Nutshell Talks allowed conference attendees to learn about ten NRT research areas and provided the student presenters with an opportunity to communicate their research.

    “Giving the nutshell talk. . .put into practice what we were taught,” commented one student presenter. “It was wonderful to see how effective the new techniques we were taught [were] at engaging the audience.”

A woman with short brown hair, a grey dress and a black sweater speaks into a microphone on a small stage.
With “Does Adapting to Climate Change Make It Worse? The Carbon Costs of Irrigation,” Avery Driscoll of Colorado State University’s Agricultural Sustainability and Climate Impacts Lab walked the audience through the complexities of carbon costs. Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

    Raun’s focus in the pre-conference workshop series, as in all the work of the Center for Communicating Science, was to help researchers learn to make their communication more personal, direct, spontaneous, responsive, and emotionally vivid. Participants developed storytelling skills, roleplayed different audience types for one another, and worked to distill their research into short, engaging talks.

A woman with medium-length brown hair, a grey blazer, and khaki pants speaks into a microphone on a small stage.
Maria Gomez Saldarriaga, attending the NRT conference from the Integrated Coastal Sciences program at East Carolina University, shared her research on ecosystem services and human health in “A Path to Landing the Passion for Remote Sensing from an Economics and Healthcare Baseline.” Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

    “The nutshell talks [were] the first time I have ever felt happy with a presentation I’ve given!” said another presenter. “The practice opportunities, particularly the exercises around re-framing the talk from different perspectives, were very effective tools for preparation.”

This photo shows a young white male wearing khaki pants and a gray sweater walking toward the camera on a stage. Behind him is a large screen projecting a slide the says Why do Psychoactive Drugs Work? and his name Ezry Santiago-McRae, along with a logo for the Virginia Tech Center for Communicating Science.
“Why do Psychoactive Drugs Work?” We all know someone who has benefited from them, but it turns out we don’t really understand the mechanisms behind the effects, according to Ezry Santiago-McRae from the Physics Department and the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at Rutgers University. Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

    According to the National Science Foundation website, the NRT program “seeks proposals that explore ways for graduate students in research-based master’s and doctoral degree programs to develop the skills, knowledge, and competencies needed to pursue a range of STEM careers. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas, through a comprehensive traineeship model that is innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.” The program’s commitment to enhancing the communication skills of graduate students was a driving force in the conference partnership with the Center for Communicating Science.

A young woman with long dark hair , a patterned shirt, and green pants speaks into a microphone on a small stage.
Mehak “MJ” Jain, attending from San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center, conveyed her passion for marine ecosystem restoration with her talk titled “Eelgrass to the Rescue!” Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

    This year’s NRT meeting was hosted by Virginia Tech’s Disaster Resilience and Risk Management (DRRM) program, which is directed by Robert Weiss and supported by NRT funding. The conference team included Marie Paretti, education director of the DRRM program; Sharon Stacy, program coordinator for the Center for Coastal Studies; and engineering graduate students Maya Menon and Qualla Ketchum.

A young man with short brunette hair, a black blazer, jeans, and boots speaks into a microphone on a small stage.
Chuck Baker, from the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Maryland-College Park, gave a talk titled “Who Knew the Atmosphere Had Boundaries Too? The Planetary Boundary Layer and Its Characteristics.” Photo courtesy of Carrie Kroehler.

    Other institutions represented in the Communicating Research student group included North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the University of Akron, the University of Illinois, the Ohio State University, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Irvine.