Importance of elevator talks:
Job interviews. You may meet someone important (deans, vice-presidents, etc.) for only a
minute or two.
Conferences. Interdisciplinary collaborations start when people from different fields can share
ideas.
Grants. NSF grants require a one-page, non-technical description of the proposed research,
effectively a 10-floor elevator talk.
Interaction with the public. Doing science is a great way to learn about the world, and one that
people (parents/friends/taxpayers/students) need to appreciate.
Your own work. Figuring out how to explain what you're doing can give you new insights into
problems in your research.
Apocrypha: Richard Feynman was once asked by a Caltech faculty member to explain why spin one-half
particles obey Fermi Dirac statistics. Rising to the challenge, he said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on
it." But a few days later he told the faculty member, "You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to
the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it."
Outline of an elevator talk:
Define a problem
Start with something that the listener is familiar with: diseases like Alzheimer's or cancer, the
need to control the amount of a drug in the body, solar energy, medical imaging,
Tell the listener something interesting about that problem
The need for drugs to be chiral, that Alzheimer's is associated with tangled-up brain peptides,
that curing cancer requires distinguishing which of your own cells are "too" active, that materials which
capture sunlight also tend to degrade in sunlight
Tell them the tools you use in your research
Computers that simulate as-yet-unknown molecules or slow down reactions, wet chemistry for
making beta-amyloid models, chiral catalysts for building chirality into achiral molecules
Tell them how you're using that tool to treat the interesting problem, what progress you've made, and
what you plan to do next.
Some Keys:
No jargon. Jargon is a verbal shorthand for specialists. Rather than saying "the solution of
Schrodinger's equation, whose square gives the probability distribution of a quantum mechanical
system", I say "wavefunction". Rather than saying, "particle that is far too small to be seen, but still
contains trillions of atoms, about the size of a small cell", I say "nanoparticle". When you speak to
nonspecialists, you can't use this verbal shorthand.
"Investigating Cytoskeletal Dynamics in the Development of Epithelial Cell Polarity" became "How Do
Cells Know Up From Down?"
Don't try to say too much. You can get, at most, one point across in 30 seconds. It's better to say
one thing that the audience understands, than to say 5 incomprehensible things.
Don't talk down to the audience. They can understand what you're doing, if it is explained
properly.
Be enthusiastic. More specifically, concentrate on projecting the enthusiasm that you already
have for your project.
Target the talk to what you know about the listener. If they're a biologist, motivate the research
with biological applications. If they're a provost, motivate it with long-term applications (curing cancer,
replacing fossil fuels...)