Join the world's largest chemistry poster conference
Postdoc Helen Casey first attended the Royal Society of Chemistry online Twitter poster conference, #RSCPoster, in 2016, when she took home the prize for the poster that received the most engagement.
The conference, now in its fifth year, takes place on Twitter over a 24 hour period, and each year attracts hundreds of presenters and thousands of attendees. It was started by members of the analytical chemistry community – as a way of sharing their research – and has now expanded to include all areas of chemistry. Last year saw the introduction of an education category and an engineering category, and this year there will be new categories for catalysis and energy & sustainability.
The 2019 edition is on 5 March, a scientific committee of leading chemical scientists will judge the competition. The committee also take a leading role in ensuring that discussion flows and that each presenter receives some questions on their poster.
This year, Helen was approached to be on the scientific committee for the environmental category. "I’m just over the moon with that", she says. "My advice to participants is to make your poster as simple and effective as possible. Really get the take-home message across. It has to be a snapshot of your research. Get a good hook to get people to look, and then explain it in a nice concise way."
The conference’s unusual online-only format makes it open to anyone working in the chemical sciences, anywhere in the world.
"In 2016 I had lots of people asking questions and retweeting, including from places like Australia," says Helen. "All the questions were relevant to the research, and some of them really helped, and made me think of things I hadn’t thought of before."
"I think PhD students especially can feel like their research has ended up in just their thesis, and no-one can really see it. It’s really nice to get your research out there."
Helen suggests that #RSCPoster is a good way to get feedback on a poster that you might be planning to submit to a conventional conference later. It’s worth making some adjustments though: "You can’t have a lot of text on Twitter and you’ve got to keep it quite engaging for the audience."
Join the conference
Being on Twitter, the conference is of course completely free to attend, you can attend it from anywhere, and you can get as involved as you want to.
All you need to do to enter the competition is tweet an image on the day, using #RSCPoster and the appropriate hashtag for your topic. Find the full list of hashtags, and full instructions for taking part, on the conference's blog page.
Please note that to be considered for a prize you do need to register, which you can do on our events page.
Whether or not you submit a poster be sure to follow #RSCPoster between 9 am GMT on 5 March and 9 am GMT on 6 March to get involved in the conversation.
Prizes for Australian chemists
If you’re an Australian chemist there’s an extra prize on offer. In the spirit of the recent agreement between the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI), our Aussie colleagues are supporting the #RSCPoster Twitter Conference 2019 with prizes for the best posters presented by Australian chemists. An independent panel of Australian researchers will be taking part in the event, judging posters that include the hashtag #ozchem alongside the #RSCPoster and subject hashtags.
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