• Poster Session Guidelines
• Talk Session Guidelines

Please note that if you were accepted to present an abstract at the conference, your notification e-mail should specify whether you were accepted to give a talk or poster. Furthermore, please note that if you are scheduled to give a talk on the opening day of the conference, then your acceptance e-mail would also state this fact. In other words, if your acceptance e-mail does NOT say that you are giving a talk on the opening day, then your talk is in one of the other sessions (see the meeting schedule for a list of the sessions.)

Posters will be displayed for the entire meeting, but you will only be required to attend your poster for one session.  Posters CANNOT EXCEED 2.5 ft. (76 cm) wide x 4 ft. (122 cm) high. However, as you may be aware from previous years, the size of display panels at this meeting is somewhat variable.  Therefore, many presenters prefer to paste figures onto separate boards, rather than bringing a single large poster, to allow the presentation to be reconfigured depending on the exact space available.  Please be certain to include your title (in large letters), and make sure that your poster is legible from a distance of at least 4 ft. (122 cm).  You may also want to bring some extra data (not appearing on the poster), which may be of interest to specialists in your field.  Please contact Judith Taylor in advance if you have special requirements for your presentation, such as an internet connection or video projector i.e., in order to demonstrate web resources during the poster sessions. (Also note that there is also now a separate "web presentation" category--added last year-- for presentations that are predominantly web- or computer-based.)

Please plan your presentation to take a maximum of 12 minutes, leaving 3 minutes for discussion.  Note that the tight schedule means that no presentations will be permitted to run more than 15 minutes, including question time!  Although the majority of your talk should be devoted to unpublished material, remember that the audience consists of molecular biologists, biochemists and cell biologists working on a diverse array of systems; please be sure to provide adequate introduction, explaining what questions you are asking and why your work is of interest.  Most investigators find that a maximum of 10-12 slides can be shown in the time available.  Please make sure that the text size and coloring is suitable to be viewed from the back of a large lecture theater.

If you are planning to make a PowerPoint presentation, the MPM organizers and Woods Hole IT staff would greatly appreciate having your presentation in advance of the start of the meeting.

Having your presentation ahead of time will allow the MBL IT staff to organize and catalog the presentations, thus making registration go more smoothly and hopefully avoiding any last minute on-site problems.  Regarding this, we would like to make a special plea to those of you who are giving presentations on the first day to make a special effort to get your presentation to us ahead of time. Although our preference is to have your presentations in advance, you will still be able to upload from laptops, zip drives, or CDs at registration as well as make last minute changes to previously uploaded presentations.

To this end, MBL has set up an FTP site which will enable you to easily upload your presentation.  The directions appear below.  If you run into any problems trying to upload your presentation, please contact Chris Dematos, whose contact information appears below.