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Communicating Your Research

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Chad Gilpin, The Graduate School

Dr. Kendra Hargis-Stenzel, UK Innovate

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Are you recording?

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  • Introduction
  • Communicating Your Research
  • About UK GradResearch Live! and 3MT
  • Tips for Submission
  • Title
  • Slide
  • Q&A

Communicating Your Research

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Communicating Impact in Academic Research

Kendra Hargis-Stenzel, PhD, MBA

Director, Innovation Talent Development

Connecting Research to Human Context, Significance, and Application

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OUR GOALS

Research impact engine

Drive R&D growth in Kentucky

Increase participation of innovators in activities

Culture builder and thought leader for innovation and entrepreneurship

The innovation, entrepreneurship and economic enterprise for UK Research

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What is the overall impact you’re aiming for?​

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  • Significance
  • Human Context
  • Broader Implications
  • Communication
  • Application
  • Methodology
  • Controls
  • Variables
  • Rigor
  • Reproducibility
  • Specialization

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Presentations, posters, manuscripts are not just a record of completed work.

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They tell a story about your contribution to the field.​

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WHAT IS IMPACT?

  • Publications
  • Methodological insight
  • New framework
  • Theoretical advancement
  • Translation
  • Implementation
  • Community awareness and benefit
  • Policy/practice influence
  • Cultural understanding

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impact

Impact

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Knowledge

Translation

Application

Community Outcomes

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IMPACT SPANS ALL DISCIPLINES

  • English
    • Shaping cultural narratives
    • Reframing historical interpretation
    • Influencing public discourse
    • Preserving perspectives
  • Music
    • Community engagement
    • Accessibility
    • Therapeutic applications
    • Cultural preservation

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  • Education
    • Curriculum development
    • Classroom implementation
    • Student outcomes
    • Accessibility
  • Social Work
    • Intervention models
    • Policy recommendations
    • Support systems
    • Implementation barriers

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Audience Considerations

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(Technical framing)

What are you studying?

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(Contextual framing)

Why does this matter?

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  • Aging
  • Psychosocial stress
  • Sleep fragmentation
  • Cognition
  • Loss of independence

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I studied the problem, but I did not fully understand the lived experience of the problem

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Give people a reason to listen

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Technical Opening

Audience-Centered Opening

I studied how aging changes the effects of stress on sleep and memory, and explored whether promoting deep sleep could protect memory after stress.

My grandmother, like many older adults, wanted to keep living independently. As her memory changed, that became harder.

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Familiar experience

Research Question

Essential term

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Social circumstances can contribute to ongoing stress.

Memory and independence can become increasingly difficult with age.

Sleep changes as we age.

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Question: How does age change the response to stress? Could promoting deep sleep help protect memory?

Approach: Compare stress responses across age groups; measure sleep and performance on a memory task; explore a sleep-promoting drug.

What I found: Young and older rats responded differently. The drug showed a possible memory benefit in young stressed rats, but not older rats.

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Question

Approach

Finding

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Innovation Training�

Overview:

  • 10 short, asynchronous courses
  • Equips learners with foundational knowledge of impact research and commercialization

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Course Themes:

  • Innovation
  • Commercialization
  • Entrepreneurship

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Target Audience:

  • Early-stage researchers new to research and translation
  • Graduate students, postdocs

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Micro-Certification

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Sponsored by The Graduate School

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UK GradResearch Live! was born out of the University of Queensland’s 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, a research presentation initiative that challenges graduate students to communicate their research concisely and engagingly to a general audience with a single slide in three minutes.

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Why Participate?

  • Develops your communication and presentation skills to non-specialist audiences
  • Highlights important and innovative research that most of us do not hear about
  • Fosters creativity in constructing your research story and design of your slide
  • Allows for networking with other students, faculty, staff
  • Gives you an edge in the job search (or postdoc search)
  • Prize money!

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Two Tracks:

  • Pre-3MT (Early in the Research Project)
  • 3MT (Nearing Completion of the Research Project)

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Timeline:

  • Video submission deadline – 8am on Monday, 10/12/26
  • Final Event – 5pm on Wednesday, 11/4/26

How to Participate

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  • 3MT
    • First Place - $750 + Travel Funding to Compete in Regional Competition
    • Second Place - $500
    • Third Place - $250
    • People’s Choice - $250
  • Pre-3MT
    • First Place - $500
    • Second Place - $250
    • Third Place - $150
    • People’s Choice - $150

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Prizes

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TIPS: Your Presentation Title

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  • Try to keep it under 8 words
  • Keep it fun
  • Think of it as a newspaper headline or an article teaser, not as an academic journal title

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Example (from Matthew Thompson, University of Queensland)

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Dissertation title: “Structures and Features in Complex Visual Stimuli Assisting Identification in Forensics”

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3MT Title: “Suspects, Science, and CSI”

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TIPS: Your Presentation Slide

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  • Think of your slide as the background for your presentation
  • Make it simple and quickly decipherable, like a billboard.
  • Choose your fonts wisely and limit use to one or two fonts at most.
  • Use high-quality images, and don’t stretch, squeeze, or warp them.
  • Put some thought into your color scheme, or, better yet, use a design assistant
  • Leave off logos, sponsors, and affiliations

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TIPS: Submission

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  • Read all of the rules on the competition website!
  • Record yourself presenting your slide via your choice of software
    • Zoom is recommended and free to all students
      • Settings > Recording > Cloud Recording > Record Active Speaker with Shared Screen
  • Save your slide as a PDF file
  • Submit recording and slide via link on competition webpage
    • File uploads are restricted to 100MB
    • If you have any issues, email Chadwick.Gilpin@uky.edu

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Additional Resources

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University of Queensland’s 3MT site:

https://threeminutethesis.uq.edu.au/watch-3mt

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University of Kentucky’s previous competitions:

https://gradschool.uky.edu/uk-gradresearch-live

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Q&A

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Closing Slide

ukinnovate@uky.edu

research.uky.edu/ukinnovate

linkedin.com/company/ukyinnovate

UK Innovate at the

University of Kentucky

@uky_innovate

@uky_innovate