Graduate Studies

Poster Session

Application Deadline for 2025: TBD

What is a Poster Session?

A poster presentation serves as a formal and research-oriented display of your work. Through text, charts, graphs, and images, it visually represents your research or creative work. Poster sessions enable viewers to peruse your research material at their own pace and engage with you, possibly asking questions regarding your methods or findings.

Poster Guidelines

A research poster aims to communicate your work and spark discussions. It should be self-explanatory, presenting research findings in a clear and succinct manner. To effectively convey your work, include major sections akin to a research paper:
  • Introduction
  • Methods
  • Results
  • Conclusions/Discussion
Arrange these sections in columns, ensuring clear identification. Consider printing section headings at a height of 10 mm for better readability. All other text should be legible from a distance of 4 feet, ideally ranging from 5 to 10 mm in height.
Poster Size
  • The suggested poster size is 34 inches wide by 48 inches high. Posters may be printed in a landscape (horizontal) fashion or portrait (vertical) fashion. 
  • We suggest you create your poster in MS PowerPoint (using your own design or using one of the templates below) and convert your file to a PDF for printing.
Templates:
  • These templates are available for you to use. If you are currently using another template from a previous poster session, you may use that. 
Printing:
  • The Office of Graduate Studies will print your poster for the symposium. Please be sure to upload your file as a PowerPoint file. 

Poster Content

  • Title and Authors: Place the title and names of authors at the top center of the poster. For readability the title should be 15 mm in height (Legible from 10 feet).
  • Introduction: Give a brief background/foundation, then state the purpose of your research as either a question or hypothesis.
  • Methods: Brief description of the techniques, data collection, replicas, and statistics you used. Omit unnecessary detail.
  • Results: Professionally prepared tables and graphs that are easy to read and understand.
  • Conclusions: What did you find out? Did you accept or reject your hypothesis? Describe results in terms of general biological principles. What is the significance of the findings?

Participant Information

If you are presenting as a team with other students, only one person needs to complete the application on behalf of the team. During registration, you'll have the opportunity to list your co-presenters on the application form.

Poster Abstract and Submission

Application deadline for 2025: TBD

Your abstract should include a brief description of the significance of your research, as well as the experimental hypotheses, methods employed, and significance of conclusions.