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Posters Presented at Other Conferences

If your project has been presented as a poster at another conference, we encourage you to save printing costs by presenting the same poster at this symposium, even if the order of authors will be different. As the presenter at this Symposium, you should list yourself first when you submit your abstract. You will be listed as the Presenting (first) author in the Program.  Because 50% of the poster score is based on the abstract, the submitted abstract should be written by you. Please review the guidelines below and rework your abstract for the audience at this Symposium as necessary.

Abstracts

Abstracts should be 300 words or less, excluding the title, authors and their affiliations. Use an asterisk to indicate the presenting author. The annual research symposium is an interdisciplinary meeting where researchers from various fields will evaluate your work. When writing your abstract for this meeting, please consider the following guidelines:

• What background information will someone outside your field need to understand your work and the nature of the problem you are trying to solve?
• Does your abstract contain a clearly defined hypothesis or goal?
• What results were obtained and what methods were used to obtain them?
• What conclusions can be drawn from the data?
• What is the significance of your findings and their impact on the field?
• Is your abstract written in clear, concise, and easy to understand English? Try to use active verbs (e.g., discover, impair, allow) instead of inactive nouns (e.g., discovery, impairment, allowance) that can make your prose obscure. Also try to avoid wordiness and jargon. If you need to use field-specific technical jargon, explain it.
• When you have written your abstract, please have someone outside your immediate lab read it to assess whether they understand it. If they don’t understand it, your reviewers may not understand it either!

Posters

Please limit the size of your poster to a maximum of 48” x 72”. You may use a poster that you presented at another conference. However, if that poster includes an abstract that does not match the one you submitted for this meeting, you should print a copy of the new abstract and pin it next to your poster.  

Judging

Students will be judged 50% on their abstract and 50% on their poster presentation. It is essential that the student, not the mentor, write the abstract because it is the student that is being judged.

Abstract Criteria:

The first half of the score will be based on the abstract. Each judge will receive copies of the abstracts prior to the day of the meeting. The judges will read the abstracts before the meeting and assess them based on the following criteria:

Poster Criteria:

One-half of the score will be based on the poster presentation.  The student must be present at the assigned time of judging.  The following criteria will be used to evaluate each poster.