About the Poster Competition

Important Announcement

NSF funding for this project ended October 1, 2015. As of August 31, 2023 the site was archived. All videos, posters, and discussions remain available.

The 2013 IGERT.org Video and Poster Competition will take place on May 21 - 24, 2013. This competition is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and facilitated by IGERT.org, a project run by TERC, a non-profit located in Cambridge MA. The video and online competition platform was created at TERC.

The competition includes both video and poster components, which reflects an expanding interest in using media to promote the understanding and dissemination of scientific ideas. Holding this competition online enables a greater number of IGERT faculty, trainees, project coordinators, and alumni to participate and to interact with presenters. In addition, members of the general public have the opportunity to interact with presenters and to "like" their favorite presentation on Facebook.

The competition features over 100 presentations each made by a student or a team of students nominated from different IGERT Ph.D. programs. The work presented often transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries and addresses complex research problems of significant scientific and societal importance. While the presenters have been asked to make their posters for a technical/scientific audience, their videos are to be geared toward a more general, non-technical/non-scientific audience.

Some of the presenters are early in their graduate studies; others are approaching graduation and may be seeking post-doctoral positions and other employment opportunities. You can find out more about the presenters by clicking their names, which will link to their bios.

We are grateful to the many IGERT faculty who volunteered to be judges for the competition. We have selected 50 judges and have taken care to avoid conflicts of interest. Hence judges may not be perfectly paired with their specific area of expertise. They will judge the videos and posters and presenters’ replies to judges’ queries. Judges will choose 20 of the 25 winners.

The IGERT.org community (faculty, trainees, program coordinators, and alumni) of currently funded and post-funded programs are encouraged to participate and to share their thoughts with presenters by commenting on videos and posters. Community members are also asked to select 4 presentations that they find most meritorious as their “Community Choice” votes. An additional 4 of the 25 winners will be chosen by “Community Choice”.

Guests, future employers, and interested members of the public are invited to browse the posters, watch the videos, and post comments to each of the presenters' discussions. To contact a presenter(s), click on their name to see their bio. The public will also have the opportunity to choose 1 additional winner in this competition as a way to select the presenter who was most effective in disseminating science to a broad audience. The presenter who receives the most "likes" on Facebook will be selected as this Public Choice winner.

The 25 winners will be announced online here on the competition website on Friday, May 24th. It will also be announced on IGERT.org.

After the competition, we will be sending a survey to all participants to learn from your experience. We look forward to hearing your feedback, and learning from it, as we think about how this may be done in the years ahead.

To see the archive of last year’s competition, please visit the 2012 Poster Competition website.