By Sarah Cole
It’s not every day you find out a CRC was founded in the very same room, years before, in which we were training the CRC’s PhD students.
The CRC for Water Sensitive Cities‘ CEO, Professor Tony Wong, began the day’s training with a fascinating presentation, then departed, and we got underway with a full workshop day of presentation and poster skills.
The CRC aims to revolutionise how water is managed here and overseas.
Prof. Wong and the CRC researchers know that making towns and cities water sensitive will take more than just technically elegant engineering solutions: its work takes into account urban planning, law, ecology, urban climates and climate change, social science, managing change management, the ‘water economy’ and community health.
Because the teams of researchers and students are interdisciplinary in nature, and have to work with practitioners, policymakers and regulators, it’s critical for them to be able to share their work in ways that are suited to whoever they’re talking to. They need to distill their niche research into succinct, simple and very relevant information.
So, we worked with over 40 PhD students in August to train them in talking about their work, both presenting science and creating a poster about it.
Everyone presented 3 times – the workshop was very practical – and went home with a lot of practice, lots of tips, and experience in giving feedback.
We were pleased to see that 50 students created posters for the 2nd Water Sensitive Cities Conference in Brisbane, and the finalists’ posters were described as “inspiring research summaries“.
Congratulations to workshop participants:
- Francesco Gimelli, who was awarded a travel prize for “his evocative discussion of Governing Water Justly in his poster and 2-minute presentation. Francesco, from Monash University, gave a moving presentation on how his research aims to understand the problems facing women in developing countries collecting water, and will help improve water governance.”
- Veljko Prodanovic (Monash University), who was awarded the runner-up prize for his Green Walls for Greywater Reuse poster and presentation.
Other finalists included Monash University student Behzad Jamali, Charlie Lam from Monash University, Carl Davies from University of Western Australia and Gemma Dunn from Monash University.
We certainly look forward to training more CRC for Water Sensitive Cities students.
Image credit: CRC for Water Sensitive Cities