Talking the talk

When trying to express the sheer scope of global carbon emissions, UChicago Engineering master’s student Yousuf Mitchell chose a different unit of measurement than cubic meters or metric tons: Sears Towers.

“The United States and China alone produce enough carbon emissions yearly to fill over two million Sears Towers,” Mitchell told the audience of faculty, students and industry leaders at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering’s (UChicago PME) Communication Skills for Industry Program capstone event.

The program offers PME postdocs, PhD, and Master’s students focused, practice-based, and mentored communications training so they can convey how innovations and discoveries might go from lab to market. This year’s class is the biggest yet, with five master’s students, seven PhD students and four postdoctoral researchers learning how to talk so that people in a wide range of industrial roles will listen.

“I encourage you all to continue practicing, to continue putting yourself out there and talking about the work that you do to a wide range of audiences,” Assistant Dean of Education and Outreach Laura Rico-Beck told the assembled crowd at the capstone event on Thursday.

The capstone is the culmination of the 10-week course, when the students give a competitive three-minute talks to a panel of working industry experts. The judges were just four of the 28 industry mentors students had access to throughout the course.

“One thing that surprised me is how many resources, how many people we could get in touch with in this class,” said Kun Wang, a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion. “We had a one-to-one mentor from industry, but the instructors also arranged for people from different companies’ hiring teams and management teams as well as some fresh graduates to talk to us. So I was exposed to a lot of people actually working in industry and hear their advice and insights.”

Half of the mentors were at UChicago PME themselves before moving into engineering jobs at a spectrum of companies across the nation, said Director of Career Development Briana Konnick.

This includes Dimitris Priftis, who took his own experience at UChicago PME to the aerospace company Blue Origin.

“Being an industry mentor and a PME alum has been such a rewarding experience,” Priftis said. “It’s not just about sharing what I’ve learned—it’s about helping others grow, building their confidence, and seeing how those small moments of guidance can lead to big changes in their careers and the industry as a whole.”  

The PhDs and postdoctoral researchers gave three-minute talks on their research. The master’s students, who don’t engage in research as part of their degree program, presented on topics of scientific interest, which is how Mitchell found himself expressing air pollution in Sears Towers.

“The original number for carbon emissions between the United States and China is 20 gigatons a year. No one even knows what a gigaton is, let alone a ton,” said Mitchell. “I was looking at the skyline while I was thinking about it. The Sears Tower is the biggest thing in my view, so I just figured out a calculation to see how many of those that would fit in.”

Even calling it the Sears Tower was a deliberate choice to help communicate the topic. Mitchell felt using the original name would play better to Chicagoan sensibilities than the building’s current name, the Willis Tower.

The course wasn’t only about speaking to a range of industrial audiences, but also taught how to communicate with experts in other fields. This proved particularly valuable for master’s student Amirali Monshizadeh, who wants to introduce AI and machine learning innovations to neurosurgeons. This means explaining high-end computational modeling to people whose job is, quite literally, brain surgery.

“With a lay audience, you have to focus on the motivation behind the project,” Monshizadeh said. “You have to explain why we are doing what we're doing, why we’re even bothering with this in the first place. With the more expert audience, they are maybe more familiar with that, so you can go into the more detail.”

Monshizadeh took first place among the master’s candidates, with Ashley Ellis taking second. Among the PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers, Kun Wang took first, Joe Reda took second and Jerry Hertzog third.

The Communication Skills for Industry Program is offered each year in the Autumn Quarter.

• Learn more about UChicago PME’s Science Communications Program