In preparing and presenting at the ICE 2016

It is always a challenge to prepare presentations for scientific meetings. You always want to do a good job in effectively communicating your research, in a way that you don't confuse or bore people, which becomes trickier when you are new to the group you are working with and even more defiant when your audience is composed by people that has been working on this for many years and are recognized experts in the field.

Thing is that I'm more interested and, so far, much more focused on morphology, which was only one of the three main themes I was supposed to talk about. I consider myself a lucky person in general. I've had all the support, data and information I've needed from my advisor, Dr. Andrew Short, our postdoc researcher, Dr. Emmanuel Toussaint and my labmates at the Short Lab. It was not easy to get smooth transitions between the molecular phylogeny that we have now, the different ecologies of the beetles and their morphological features.

In the end I think it went well. Here is the only photo from my presentation. It was taken by our Lab Technician Sarah Schmits. I didn't even made it to the water beetle people group picture... oh well...

The file with the presentation is posted at ResearchGate.