Presentation Guidelines

Here are some guidelines to help you as you prepare your presentation:

• Please plan to bring your presentation on a laptop that can be connected to the class projector.
• Each team will have a total of 10 minutes for their presentation. This includes the time for set up. After about 8 minutes, we will let you know that you have only 2 minutes left, so you can conclude your presentation. Please make every effort to stay on time, so that all teams have a chance to present.
• Remember that you have become expert in the model that you are presenting, but the rest of the class has not read your paper and may know nothing about the topic. So,
  • Provide clear background explanations.
  • Make sure to explain the significance of the work biologically.
  • Present a clear hypothesis, and provide an outline for the work that was done on the model.
• Provide a clear explanation for the components of the model. Simply flashing up a large number of equations is not likely to be useful.
  • Briefly describe the biological meaning of the state variables and the key parameters that will help your audience follow your presentation.
    • For example: There are three state variables. S represents the number of people who are susceptible to infection; I represents the number who are currently infected; and R represents those recovering from infection.
  • Indicate the significance of the different terms in the equations. If you have many equations with many terms, choosing a representative example may be sufficient.
    • For example: the term μ X, the product of the death rate μ and the state variable X, which represents the number of living individuals, represents the rate at which individuals die.
• Simply presenting the figures from the paper that you reproduced is unlikely to be interesting to anyone else in the class. It is much more important to present the rationale for your results, and summarize what you are showing and what it signifies, than to simply put up one figure after another (saying, here's the reproduction of their first figure, etc.). Why should anyone care?
  • To give a concrete example:
    • Instead of "Here is our reproduction of figure 2 of the paper", you say:
    • "We wanted to understand how the equilibrium points that we identified in the first part of the project would be affected by varying this key parameter k, which represents the rate at which mRNA for the key enzyme Akt1 is synthesized by the nucleus. Intuitively, we expected that this would have relatively little effect until the rates were comparable to this other enzyme, protein phosphatase 2, which, as we just explained, plays a key role in breaking down the compound. To our surprise, the model predicted that over a relatively narrow range the outputs would change very significantly. But analyzing the dynamics clarifies why [Now you point to your figure] As you can see, in this region, the entire system undergoes a bifurcation, the previously stable equilibrium loses stability, and the new equilibrium point pulls the system into this new configuration."
  • Providing this kind of explanation will make your presentation much more interesting to the rest of the class.
• If you did extensions to the model, provide a clear rationale for them, and explain what you learned from doing them.
• Make sure to have a clear summary and conclusions section, so students who may not have followed all the details of your model still get a sense of what you found out and now understand.
• Please practice. You need to decide how to divide up the delivery between the teammates. Ten minutes is actually a very short time for a presentation, and if you haven't practiced, you may find that we have to cut you off before you've presented any of the real results, which would be very frustrating for you (and for us). Of course, if you rattle though the material too quickly, no one will understand you either.

Presentations are worth up to 3 points of extra credit, based on the discretion of the instructors. Following these guidelines is likely to earn you the full three points.