Rethinking the Academic Poster?

Written by Chrystelle Kiang

Poster sessions are a requirement for our MPH/ MPSH students and part of almost every scientific conference, yet making a poster can be a stressful. Research posters are a concise way to showcase your work and allow more creativity in presenting results. They allow people who may not be experts on your topic to gain an idea of current research and new findings in the field.

What tends to happen though, is that people take sections of a write up of their results and re-arrange them around some old template. Don’t get me wrong- a template is useful, especially when a reader only has a few minutes to spend on a poster. However, the large chunks of text defeat the purpose of the poster. May as well hand out copies of the original paper. Mike Morrison, a PhD student in Industrial and organizational psychology at Michigan State, is on a mission to fix academic posters. He made a video explaining the current problem and proposes a bold new template with focus on the main finding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RwJbhkCA58

We’ll see if this takes off, but is something to consider when making your next poster.

Mike is on twitter (@mikemorrison) and his template can be found at https://osf.io/6ua4k/ .