Coaching to Connect: Teaching Northwestern, UChicago, & UIC Physician Scientists How to Give Dynamic Talks to a Lay Audience

When physician researchers start telling their lab teams to create social media videos, you know the importance of science communications has been absorbed!

It was a blast coaching faculty from Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Loyola University Chicago, and University of Illinois at Chicago on how to tell powerful stories to a non-scientific audience.

One talk started with a jagged picture of a kidney stone and painful patient story.

Another embraced conflict and talked about how pregnant women were unnecessarily dying.

Audience members also learned how they'll likely have osteoarthritis when they get older - and what someone is doing to help people avoid it.

Each faculty member embraced stepping outside their comfort zone and saw from the audience feedback that the storytelling strategies they were perhaps a little wary of trying had the biggest impact on their listeners.

Hear directly from them in these videos!

This initiative was through the Institute for Translational Medicine supported by the National Institutes of Health in partnership with Chicagoland's top academic medical centers.