What is the Shark Tank Competition?

You just found out how to deliver drugs at the molecular level. You created a novel photonic device or quantum computer on a chip. You invented a new type of soil sensor for agriculture. You are the next successful researcher in nanotechnology. How do you let the world of investors, potential employers, or media that what you do should make them stop in their tracks and pay attention?

The skill you need is that of a master storyteller. This is, however, more than the ability to crack a joke during a presentation. It goes beyond using more pictures and fewer words in your Powerpoint slides. It is about creating strong arguments. It is about violating expectations. It is about using numbers like levers, not bludgeons. It is about timing and flexibility in delivery. It is about appealing to people’s sense of logos, pathos, and ethos; reason, feeling, and ethics can take you a long way.

The Science Communication Shark Tank competition gives you a chance to learn and train these skills in the best possible way: by playing a real-life game. You will participate as a member of the team in a science storytelling seminar, will learn how to create a scientific story, and you will prepare a written and a spoken presentation, which will be judged for selection in a live, Shark Tank Competition. Run by a group of talented professional communicators, the competition will award prizes and, most important, will offer the participants a chance to work with one of the sharks to refine their story and release it to the general public through a specialized media campaign.

The Contestant Teams

1. Perfect Ripeness Every Time: Design of Continuous Fruit Monitoring Technology
   Authors: Aiganym Yermembetova and Benjamin Washer
2. Seeing the Invisible
   Authors: Sami Alajlouni and Kerry Maize
3. Image Analysis for Water Safety
   Authors: Min Zhao, Qiyue Liang, Ana Maria Ulloa Gomez, Suzan Diaz Amaya, Amanda Deering, Lia Stanciu, George Chiu, Jan P. Allebach
4. Creating E-skins for Structures, Machines, and People
   Authors: Jesse C Grant, Armen Yildirim
5. 1st PLACE Nanostructured Scatterers for Modern Optical Devices
   Author: Pavel Terekhov
6. 2nd PLACE 2D Materials and Hardware Security
   Author: Peng Wu
7. Handedness-Telling with a Single Device
   Author: Shouyuan Huang
8. Storing Data in Magnets with Lasers
   Authors: Aveek Dutta, Alexandra Boltasseva and Vladimir Shalaev

Who where the Sharks?

• Dr. Moira Gunn – host of NPR’s Tech Nation and BioTech Nation – stands squarely at the nexus of technology, science and society. Through her public radio program Tech Nation (heard in 144 countries), and its regular segments Tech Nation Health and BioTech Nation, she has interviewed over 3,000 people –from CEO’s to scientists, from venture capitalists to politicians, from teachers to technophobes. In her words, everyone plays a role –everyone is a piece of the puzzle. Dr. Gunn is an Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Francisco, where she created and oversees the bio-entrepreneurship graduate courses. Her research includes measuring everyday attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, math and biotechnology, and identifying the expertise needed to move breakthrough scientific research to viable commercial products.
• Sharon Weinberger – Washington, DC bureau chief for Yahoo News – previously was an executive editor at Foreign Policy magazine, and before that, the national security editor at The Intercept. Her third book, published in 2017 by Knopf, is The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program, the International Reporting Program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She has written on military science and technology for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Wired magazine, Nature, BBC, Discover, and Slate, among other publications.
• Dr. Theresa Mayer – Purdue Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships – previously at Virginia Tech where she served as vice president for research and innovation and a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Prior to her role at Virginia Tech, Mayer was at Pennsylvania State University for more than 20 years, where she served as a distinguished professor of electrical engineering, associate dean for research and innovation in the College of Engineering, the site director of the National Science Foundation’s National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network and director of the Materials Research Institute Nanofabrication Laboratory. Says Dr. Mayer, “The critical role that leading global research universities play in changing the world for the better has never been greater.”
• Dr. Sorin Adam Matei – College of Liberal Arts Associated Dean of Research and Graduate Education and Professor of Communication, Brian Lamb School of Communication – studies the relationship between information technology, group behavior, and social structures in a variety of contexts. His most recent book, Structural Differentiation in Social Media studied 10 years-worth of Wikipedia editing or 250 million individual contributions to the site. His research also investigates the role played by social media cognition and emotional responses on risk-prone or risk-averse behavior in natural emergencies. Dr. Matei leads the Global Communication Study Abroad program organized with support experts from the French National Assembly and from the French Superior Council for Audio-Visual Media (FCC equivalent).

Office of the Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the College of Liberal Arts and the Birck Nanotechnology Center

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Neil R Dilley (2020), "Birck Science Communication Shark Tank Compititon 2020," https://nanohub.org/resources/34509.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. presentation methods & techniques
2. professional development
3. science communication
4. Shark Tank Competition