Aalto University: Doctoral Students Showcase Presentation Skills at School of Electrical Engineering PechaKucha Event

PechaKucha is a widely known event concept where speakers present topics to the audience within a certain time frame. At the School of Electrical Engineering’s first PechaKucha event, the school’s own doctoral students got to practice presenting the topic of their dissertation. However, the challenge was to condense the topic of the dissertation into a presentation of 10 slides, where a maximum of 20 seconds could be spent on each slide.

A total of 13 doctoral students from the School of Electrical Engineering participated in the event. Each participant managed to tackle the challenges posed by the time constraint and pitch the topic of their dissertation brightly to the audience. In addition to the time scale, a particular challenge in pitching a doctoral dissertation is to present the research in a way so that the research is understandable to the public.

We got to hear about interesting doctoral dissertations, such as research on 2D materials, improving the energy efficiency of cars with thermoelectronic materials, and the finding more sustainable solutions and their development in space satellite material technology. After each speech, the participants were able to vote for what they thought were the most successful presentations. The School of Electrical Engineering awarded all participants with their own t-shirts.

Based on the public vote, the first PechaKucha event at the School of Electrical Engineering was won by three doctoral students for their successful and popular presentation of the dissertation topic within the time limit:

• Jon Fagerström, DICE,  “Artificial Room Reverberation using Dark Velvet Noise”,
• Priyanka Goel, ELE, “Low-Dimensional Thermoelectric Materials”,
• Veli Voipio, ELE, “Gopher antenna: A new type of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) antenna”