About Our Team.
Elevator Talk workshops and seminars are run by Carolyn Gale and her team of specialists. A communication and educational technology designer, researcher, and trainer, Carolyn co-created the Stanford Research Communication Program in 2000, a university-level initiative to teach PhD-level researchers how to communicate to lay audiences. Recognizing the value of this program, she expanded it to broaden its potential for other individuals and agencies. Carolyn and her team have now taught Elevator Talk to over 600 participants at universities throughout North America, Europe, South Africa and Japan.
We bring researchers to the people.
What Is an Elevator Talk?
An Elevator Talk explains your research to an audience in 60 seconds or less, and helps them understand its importance quickly. Based on curriculum developed at Stanford University, and incorporating extensive communication studies, Elevator Talk workshops and coaching teach your how to be an effective advocate for your work and engage your audience in a way that is clear, succinct, and – most important – keeps their attention.
Expert skills for when you need them most.
Imagine you've been researching drug diffusion through transdermal drug delivery systems, and you've met someone with connections that could increase funding for your research. How do you get him or her to understand the aspects of your work that involve molecular scales, molecular dynamics simulations, and finite element calculations? How do you keep their interest when it's most vital to do so?
Elevator Talk helps solve this communication problem with workshops that help researchers across all disciplines learn techniques for communicating the nature and impact of their work to non-specialized audiences. These workshops can bring immediate benefits for those who are:
- Submitting a grant proposal to an agency that wants to know the relevance to society
- Wanting to avoid misrepresentation during media interviews
- Close to graduating with a PhD or finishing a postdoc, and who need both a job and a superlative edge over their competition
- Researchers for whom English is a second language, but a necessary aspect of their work
- Multidisciplinary researchers who need to communicate across disciplines
- Countless others in need of great communication skills
If you want to learn how to give non-specialists a better understanding of your work, then Elevator Talk can help. It can improve the value of your research by impacting the very people you need to reach.
Endless applications, all leading to success.
The most important feature of Elevator Talk? It works. Results from a 2005 study showed that Elevator Talk instruction helped researchers increase the ability to effectively communicate their work to others. With researchers participating from universities in the US, Sweden, and South Africa, the Elevator Talk concept translates well across cultures..
The benefits of these sessions can pay off exponentially. It can close the communication gap between your research and those who fund it. It can also enable stronger connections between industry partners, entrepreneurs, and researchers from other disciplines. And though Elevator Talk cannot ensure the success of any research, it will improve the adoption efficiency of scholarly research by lay audiences and other interested parties.
