Presentations in the Biology Seminar Series occur each week from 1-2 pm, generally on Wednesdays. This is a forum for visiting scientists to convey topics of interest to the department and an excellent opportunity for Department members learn about cutting edge research. You are required to attend these seminars during the semester. They will form the basis for the discussion groups and blog postings. In addition to the Departmental seminar program you will also be required to attend 3 seminars elsewhere. These seminars can be in other departments at Macquarie University and/or outside Macquarie at institutions such as, but not limited to, other universities, museums, botanical gardens or other research oriented institutions. The aim is to broaden your horizons. 

Discussions following a seminar or conference allow researchers to explore more deeply the topics covered, benefit from the knowledge and thoughts of others and at times question the speaker more closely. Proactive participation in a discussion group subsequent to the departmental seminar is required. Early in the program we will examine effective ways to provide constructive contributions to discussion groups. You will then be required to apply these skills each week in a discussion group. The challenge will be to synthesise the information provided by the seminar speaker and place their work in a broader framework. Ultimately as a group we want to attain an understanding of the significance of the research and future research directions. Preparation for these seminars and discussion will involve researching the speaker and their previous research. Each week pairs of students will drive the discussions. These discussion leaders are expected to have put in significant preparation and be well versed on the speaker and their research. This discussion group will not assess the quality of the talk but focus on the contribution of the work to the field.On occasion the speaker will join the discussion to afford you an opportunity to ask further questions and learn more.

There are many ways to communicate science. One approach with increasing popularity is the use of online forums to convey not only the researchers work but also summarise the work of others. Online forums include blogging, social media tools and podcasting. These tools provide an opportunity to convey science a much larger and demographically broader audience – a constant and important challenge for a modern day scientist. The most successful blogs are regularly posted, accurate, engaging, and articulate and convey new and complex topics in a simple, exciting and memorable way. Doing this efficiently is facilitated by a diverse knowledge base to recognise where novel and significant contributions in research are made. By comparing and contrasting research, you should also be able to identify potential opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations.

In this exercise you will post a blog weekly/fortnightly related to the Departmental Seminar. In addition you will be asked to post blogs on the three seminars attended outside of the Departmental Seminar Series. The blogs must summarise the seminar topic, place the seminar in context of the speaker’s other work, and provide an in depth analyses of how the seminar topic contributes to the field of interest. The blogs should not criticise the style of seminar delivery. We expect evidence that you have read some primary literature on the topic, you have grasped the concepts and findings explained in the seminar and understand their significance. The blogs also need to be accessible (i.e. the challenge will be to provide a blog that a first year student would be able to understand), hence students should aim to be accurate, engaging, articulate and memorable

You will be required to critically assess two blogs of the conveners choosing for each student. The first blog will be selected early on and this activity is designed to help students identify effective blogging styles. The second will be the same blog you select for assessment conducted on a seminar outside the department. Using the workshop tool in ilearn and the rubric designed for assessing blogs you will be asked to critically assess the blogs of all other participants within the course

New and innovative research can arise from novel combinations of theory, ideas, data and techniques. Working groups are small collections of scientists, who generally have not previously collaborated, who work intensively to integrate these novel mixes to answer outstanding or new questions and significantly advance science. Working groups tackle research questions that need data synthesis or new concepts or theory – they rarely include collecting new data.  Working groups usually involve bringing people from across the globe to a single location and providing a workspace for several days at a time over a couple of months/years, allowing for intensive work.

Key to a successful working group is the mix of participants – they need to have the appropriate skills, data and drive – and a clever concept. There are several funding bodies that provide resources for working groups as they are a very effective and exciting way of producing high impact research. In this exercise you will need to prepare a working group proposal for a hypothetical funding body (we will provide their guidelines).  This will involve identifying a novel topic of interest, which individuals will be invited to attend the working group and it will be important to have a strong argument justifying the importance of research. We strongly recommend that you make use of the seminars you have seen as a basis for your proposal (combining an interesting question from one speaker with the methods from another, for example). Significant thought will need to be given to this project and students are strongly advised to allocate adequate time to thinking about their proposal.