Written by Dr Emily Nightingale

Last year’s Women in CMMID retreat saw women and non-binary folks from PhD to Professor come together at the Museum of the Home in East London. This inspiring venue, away from our usual workplaces, helped to trigger conversations that perhaps we wouldn’t usually have had.

In particular, we benefited from a coaching session given by science communicator Jamie Gallagher, addressing the challenge of the academic “elevator pitch”. At conferences, workshops, and meetings, we all expect the question “So what do you work on?”. But are we sufficiently prepared to answer it? I’ve often struggled to distil what I do into a few sentences, trying to say too much or making it too broad and vague - neither way leaves the person with a useful or memorable nugget of what you’re about. I can think of many interactions where both parties have said their piece and moved on none the wiser. That’s never helpful for inspiring collaborations.

As an academic himself, Jamie understood very well the particular challenges of interactions at conferences and conference-adjacent events. You hope to have meaningful interactions, but there are a lot of people and not much time. Perhaps you’re excited to introduce yourself to a big name in your field, but you have only sixty seconds to catch them on their way to refill on cheese and wine. This is where you deploy your elevator pitch - a few sentences that capture the motivation, context, and specific focus of your research.

We first practiced with the covers of famous novels, attempting to describe the story as quickly and concisely as possible for our group to guess them. We reflected on the components of the story that were most recognisable in each case, and considered what would be the equivalent “main characters” and defining features of our research.

For the pitch itself, Jamie’s advice was to approach it like a jigsaw. You start with the corners and edges, defining a boundary and framing the overall problem. You then build up a particular section based on similar colours and shapes - this is one aspect of the problem that people in your area are working on. Your work is then a single jigsaw piece that you’re adding to the section. Your pitch comprises of three sentences that communicate these elements:

• Border: What’s the overall challenge?
• Section: What are people in your area working on?
• Piece: How does your work fit into the area?

So, an example from my own research could look something like this…

• Border: Defining disease elimination is hard because we know surveillance is imperfect, so we can never be certain about the absence of infection.
• Section: In the case of polio, there are multiple surveillance mechanisms with different limitations, and we need to make decisions about the expansion/withdrawal of interventions based on this information. 
• Piece: I’m working to understand patterns in how surveillance performance varies over space and time and, as a result, how confident we can be about absence of infection on a national or regional level.

Surrounding discussions during the day highlighted that self-promotion is something female and non-binary scientists often struggle with. This feeds a progression gap that is evident in the lack of diversity at the most senior levels, and spans across industries. Success in academia depends on building collaborations through these kinds of informal interactions, therefore making yourself memorable is such an important skill.

Creating environments in which to work on these skills is one of the central aims of Women in CMMID and, so far, dozens of members have benefitted from a wide range of training opportunities. Hopefully the initiative will continue to grow, supporting its members to progress their careers and close those gaps.