On 12 February, 2021, the Poster Session of the Elite Master’s Programme “Advanced Materials and Processes” (MAP) took place. Due to the SARS-CoV2 pandemic this event, usually one of the social highlights of the MAP calendar, moved online for the very first time. Among the up to 100 participants we were pleased to welcome MAP students, lecturers, researchers and administrative staff.
The MAP Poster Session is the culmination of a scientific skills course led in the Winter Semester 2021/21 by Prof. Robin Klupp Taylor and attended by the current third semester students. To enable a digital poster session, which offers the same degree of personal interactions as a traditional, analogue session, Prof. Klupp Taylor developed a concept based on two complementary online platforms: MURAL and zoom. All the posters could be seen on the former, which is an interactive online whiteboard.
Participants could easily navigate and read any of the posters and also leave questions or comments in the form of sticky notes. One definite advantage of a digital poster over an analogue one was exploited by several students – to include movies of simulations or microscopical investigations directly on the poster! The MURAL also acted as the gateway to the plenary zoom sessions, and, by clicking on the students’ photo next to each poster, participants could enter a zoom meeting with that student and discuss the poster there.
The third semester MAP students presented a total of 29 posters based on either their MAP miniproject or their bachelor’s thesis. The approximately two and a half hour event was divided into two sessions. The first of these covered projects relating to the MAP focal subjects “Advanced Processes” and “Computational Materials Science and Process Simulation”. The second was dedicated to the Focal Subjects “Biomaterials and Bioprocessing” and “Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology”.
Each started with a plenary meeting on zoom. To help participants get a quick overview of the posters the students held so-called “superflash talks”. In these 1-minute presentations the students introduced themselves and gave a very brief overview of their poster. After the talks, the session moved to the MURAL and individual scientific discussions between the presenters and participants on zoom.
Participants concluded that it was an amazing poster session of extremely high quality regarding the level of digital presentation and the academic contributions of the students. All posters reached the standard required for presentation at international conference. MAP Chair Prof. Erik Bitzek stated: “This poster presentation shows the identity of MAP. The spirit of trying out new things and formats is combined with great research as well as with excellent preparation and performance. I learnt a lot from our MAP students.”
