Guidelines for poster preparation

Poster sessions will be held in the lecture hall and AIMS Common Area. You will be asked to stand by your poster during a specified session. All participants should circulate among posters during the poster session (aside from when they are presenting their own poster) and discuss the research presented. The posters will remain up for the duration of the Clinic, so that participants presenting during the same time will have an opportunity to read and discuss each other’s posters and others in the AIMS community can view the posters.

• Do not use a font size below 24pts anywhere on your poster.
• Be sure to attribute any figures or photographs taken from outside sources (eg, give the author, year, and source for figures borrowed from published papers).
• Clearly label the axes on all figures.
• You do not need to print your poster on a large format printer. Printing your poster on individual sheets of paper is absolutely fine.
• We can print your poster for you
  • To take advantage of this option, format your poster for printing on A1 size paper, and email a PDF of your poster to posters@ici3d.org by 17:00 SAST on Friday 19 June.
  • There is no charge for one A1 poster per participant.
• There are many online sources describing how to design and structure the contents of your poster. This site is a good starting point. You may also want to consider using the “better poster” format described in this video.
• Even if you print your poster ahead of time, please bring an electronic copy with you to the Clinic.

Structure

You can structure your poster however you like and should feel free to use materials from presentations you have given previously. We recommend including the following material:

Title – Include the title of your presentation, your name, your affiliation, and names/affiliations for any co-authors.

Introduction/background – Give the audience enough information to understand the context of your research – why is it important, and what earlier studies set the stage for your work?

Question – Explicitly state the question or questions your research addresses.

Approach – Tell the audience how you addressed/plan to address the question. What methods will you use? What is the basic format of the model and what tools did/will you use to analyze it? What data will you use? How were the data collected and why are they relevant? How did/will you use the data?

Findings (If you are presenting a previous project or partially-completed project) – What have you found? What is your current understanding/interpretation of your findings? How confident are you in your findings, and why?

Expectations (If you are presenting a planned project.) – What do you expect to find? Outlining your a priori expectations before completing a project is useful – if your findings contradict your expectations you will have to figure out why, and this will show you what you really learned from your research.

Conclusions (If you are presenting a previous project or partially-completed project.) – What did you learn from your research? Do your findings have implications for disease prevention or control efforts? What are these implications?

Directions – Where are you headed next? Are there any particular aspects of your project on which you would like feedback?

• If you are presenting a planned project: Are there any aspects of what you’ve proposed that you find particularly daunting and would like to make sure we address during the Clinic? If you know what type of data you would like to use for the project but aren’t sure where to find them, bring this up – other Clinic participants may have ideas about data sources.

• If you are presenting a current project: Have you gotten stuck anywhere or do you need to learn any particular methods?

• If you are presenting a previous project: What are you working on now? What will be most useful to you in the coming weeks?

Additional guidelines

• Explain in words any equations you show.
• Diagrams often complement equations nicely to give a conceptual overview of a model.
• Keep your poster simple. Choose a few colors and use them consistently across sections. Avoid long chunks of text.
• Clearly label the axes on all figures.
• Save your poster as a PDF to guarantee we you will able to open the file without formatting problems.