The Making of an Academic Poster

I recently was invited to present a poster at the MCM 2023 conference at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France. For this poster session I decided to try out a novel scientific poster design — and people loved it! There where three key points I was keen to incorporate.

Works as a stand alone.
I wanted people to be able to navigate the poster without my input. That’s why I designed a clean, colourful layout that drew people in and guided them through the content. I chose a few paragraphs of text instead of loads of formulas, that could have overwhelmed the reader.

Works in conversation.
Talking to other researchers is the best part of a poster session for me! To encourage people to approach me, I offered a “Poster Menu”, such that people could choose between a 1min, 2min, or 4min poster summary talk. This assured researchers that I would not hog them for 25min — and I even kept myself accountable by a stop watch! Questions were, of course, always encouraged!

Make it stick… quite literally.
It was my goal for others to take away as much as possible from our interactions. That’s why I used a QR code and an NFC tag to link to our ArXiv preprint. In addition, those who visited my poster got a THETA HAT sticker, which received many compliments! It was great to spot them on people’s badges, notebooks, and laptops throughout the conference!

Thank you to everyone who came by. If you want to check out my research on Approximate Bayesian Computation for Hawkes Processes, you can find an up-to-date version on ArXiv.

Many thanks also to my sponsors: the University if Edinburgh School of Mathematics, the University of Edinburgh Go Abroad Fund, and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. 

Check it out here!