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The new course at the Feinberg Graduate School helps students translate jargon and technical terms into lay language.
The Weizmann Institute’s Feinberg Graduate School recently opened a new course in science communication skills to help scientists and students effectively convey the crux of their research and be able to adapt their presentation to a variety of audiences. As scientific ideas and concepts are often too complex for the non-expert, they can prove difficult to simplify.
The new course will assist young Weizmann scholars to overcome this challenge by teaching them how to translate scientific jargon and technical terms into lay language.
The course instructor, an expert in scicomm skills, helps participants to extract the essence of the research, fine-tune it to different audiences and scenarios (from academic conferences to donor-related events to the “elevator pitch”), and perfect their public speaking skills.
The goal is for students to walk away knowing how to communicate their work more effectively and enthusiastically, and how to make it more accessible to interested parties in and outside academia.