- Why is this important?
Why does it matter to me?
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When you're thinking about the so what
of your research talk,
you're thinking about what would be the answer
to that question?
If you're telling someone about your research
and they said, so what?
- What are the broader implications of that finding
and why does it really matter, you know, to broader society?
You want to remind your audience why they're there,
what their research story is all about,
and that's really tied to your core message.
- So for my own thesis research,
the overarching problem was we want to find vulnerabilities
in cancer cells.
By better understanding what metabolic pathways
are altered in cancer,
we can try and identify new therapies
to potentially treat cancer.
I had a very easy job,
you know, cancer is something that everybody
has experienced directly or indirectly.
- Not everyone's gonna work on a cancer.
To be important,
science does not mean you have to be dealing
with human health or the environment.
There's so much impact that comes
from working on basic science.
What excites you?
What is the thing that you're hoping to discover?
What's your personal, so what?
- I like to think back
to one of our Young Scientist Seminars' talks,
and it was a very basic biology talk.
- I studied plant sex.
But, at least as interesting as all the other kinds,
I think this is really personal to me.
I think it's really personal to you too,
because every calorie that I ate today
or that I'll eat tomorrow,
all the food that all of us will eat
for the rest of our lives really comes back to plant sex
because the product of that are the seeds,
the fruits, the vegetables that we rely on.
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- Just allowing people in the audience
to make a connection about,
how it might relate to something that
they're familiar with or might care about.
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- That's so, what it's gonna be different
for different audiences.
So, you have to think about who your audience is
to answer that so what.
- In my postdoc work,
I was focusing on studying Parkinson's disease,
and in general, neuroinflammation.
We had identified a new neuroinflammatory signal
that was going from the brain immune cells
and causing neurodegeneration.
It's a, so what for scientific audience
is the impact of this new discovery
on this field of neuroinflammation.
Whereas, the so what for my general audience
was more about therapies.
- What's the big picture thing
that everybody can appreciate?
- Maybe your research really does have some impact
or will have some impact on human health
or, you know, agriculture
or, you know, other aspects of biology.
- That so what can be an anchor point
that you can refer back to throughout your talk.
- The best possible thing that can come out of that
by having an effective so what,
and effectively tying your research story back to it
is that someone leaves that room,
and they go to colleagues, they go to a dinner party
and they're able to tell other people
about your research in the way that you'd want them to,
and make other people care about it.
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