The Unglamorous Life of an Invited Seminar Speaker

By Sonali Roy

I was invited to present this year at two universities – (1) The University of Washington in Seattle in June for a student-invited lecture, the Jill Fredericksen-Adams Endowed Lecture at “UDub.” Monday. (2) The University of Miami in Miami, Florida for a departmental seminar invited by the Biology faculty in September. Also Monday.

The Day Before

Sunday afternoon - Work on slides all morning. Research the faculty I am going to visit. Browse their work on Google Scholar. I think about that one time I had an incredible connection with a professor in Missouri two years into my side gig as a touring scientific performer, only for her to have no recollection of me when we met again at ASPB the following year. This leads me to question what makes an invited seminar speaker memorable, and I think giving a good talk is not enough. Not even asking relevant questions about their research during the 30-minute one-on-one meetings. Sending follow-up emails is not enough either. Spoiler – My experiences during these two visits made me realize that perhaps the key is identifying something concrete we can do together after this interaction, like exchanging research materials for a potential collaboration or extending an invitation to speak at a conference. Will continue to test this hypothesis.

2:00–3:00 PM – Say goodbye to the cat and Uber it to the airport for a coffee and a long flight.

8:00–9:00 PM – Arrive and check into the hotel. The hotel staff ask for my credit card for incidentals, but usually the host university covers the room upfront. I go settle into my pineapple-themed room and get something to eat. In Seattle, I went to this wonderful Middle Eastern shop that was right next to an extremely busy Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers, with a queue of students lining up all the way to the street when I arrived and still there when I was leaving. I ordered my favorite chicken shawarma, tabbouleh and Diet Coke from a very complimentary server. In Miami, I stayed at a Curio Collection by Hilton hotel called Thesis, and all I did was stare at the reception walls because I could not tell whether the plants and white orchids were real or fake. Speaking as a plant biologist, I think they were fake.

9:00–10:00 PM – Make final changes to slides but get distracted by crippling self-doubt and fear that everyone will find out tomorrow how little I know, or how much there is still left to know about the subject I am studying, and that my contributions are likely irrelevant to the field and to biology. So, I tell myself to go to sleep and practice my talk early in the morning instead.

The Day Of

6:00–7:00 AM – Wake myself up from what is always the best sleep of my life. I don't know what it is about hotel pillows. I look through my slides and practice the continuity of the talk and the transition animations. I check that the last section, with all the new results, makes some sort of coherent story because, even though these are the results I am most excited about at that moment, they are always unpublished work-in-progress data from graduate students in my lab.

7:00–8:00 AM – Coffee and breakfast. Keep checking emails to make sure my host will come get me. At UW Seattle, I had time until 10 AM.

8:00–9:00 AM – In Miami, my host picked me up from the hotel and showed me the most beautiful street anyone could live on. In Miami, plants grow on other plants (epiphytes), and everything is surreal. We walked from her house, just a street away from campus, through the university arboretum, past mango trees that share their origins with me in India, where a mango tree my father planted, still grows in my parents’ front yard.

9:00–10:00 AM – My Miami host gives me a tour of her lab and shows me findings behind her recent, well-deserved NSF grant studying the mTOR pathway in aphids. So, I tell her how much I dislike those bugs because they reduce Medicago seed set in the greenhouses. We talk about lab space architecture and how not having doors can make better collaborators out of neighbors. She makes sure she has my CV and apologizes that she will only be able to make it five minutes before the seminar to introduce me.

10:00–11:00 AM – There is somehow extra pressure when invited by students. They get to invite only one speaker a year, and it is me. So, I cannot, must not, disappoint. This one is extra special because the graduate student host who invited me put forth my name as a speaker after I gave the presidential plenary talk at ASPB, which was also indirectly a student invitation. Students have, knowingly or unknowingly, been the biggest advocates of my career to date.

My first meeting is with a friend I already know through ASPB, and his work on peptides in legume–herbivore interactions is field-defining. I am also offered this great tea from Trader Joe's. We speak about potential overlaps in research on peptide receptors and also the steady reduction in science funding. Perhaps this time slot is lucky for me because, in Miami, I also spend this hour with a legume ecologist who is studying tripartite interactions among Medicago, rhizobia, and mycorrhizae, among other things. I get this feeling that I would like to learn more about the way she thinks. "Do you want to collaborate?" I think, is the adult, science-equivalent of "Let's go play outside."

11:00 AM–12:00 noon – Time to prepare for the talk, head to the seminar room, and get something to eat beforehand. I also get to meet the lovely administrators who have arranged all the logistics of my trip. Even though I thank them, I cannot convey the depth of my gratitude for their very existence in the system because, at my university, I do all of the soul-draining travel paperwork myself. In Miami, the itinerary squeezes in a meeting with a faculty member I wanted to meet who does really cool research way outside my field, on plant–butterfly interactions.

Five minutes before my talk – My hosts introduce me to the audience. Both times, I wish I could get a copy of the blurbs they prepared. The person they introduce sounds like someone worth listening to, and I feel a little dissociated from her.

12:20–1:15 PM – The talk. After five years, I now know that if I can get through the first five slides, I can complete the full talk. Somehow, if I am a little more nervous, the adrenaline helps me do a better job presenting, but this time I do not feel nervous. I do, however, have a formula I follow for departmental seminars. I keep the title broad: “Peptide Hormones in Plant Nitrogen Acquisition.” I also find that a three-part structure works best to get the message across without losing the audience. I speak conversationally rather than giving a very formal scientific talk. That's just my preference.

The best advice I ever received about giving talks was to practice speaking out loud at least 10 times before the seminar (Thanks Ben!). Over time, I found that my optimum is five. Nowadays, I get time to practice a maximum of three times. I aim for 40–45 minutes so that it leaves plenty of time for questions and discussions.

Q&A after the talk – I do not always know the answers to the questions people ask me. Sometimes I get very technical or experiment-related questions. These are the easiest to answer because I have designed the experiment.

Some questions are suggestions for follow-up experiments. For example:

Q: I bet the difference in nutrient uptake is due not only to specific nutrient transporters but also to proton transport activity that can be detected easily with a dye.

A: Great idea! I just wish I had met you six months ago when I still had the funding to test it.

The best and most useful questions are about the unpublished work I present.

Q: Do you think there are differences in how this invasive legume selects its microbial partners in its native ancestral regions?

A: Great question. I will make sure to keep comparing the new data with those from Asia to find evidence of adaptations.

1:15–2:00 PM – We move to a conference room or student hangout space where we have lunch. In Seattle, we have bánh mì sandwiches, and in Miami, our options range from turkey, chicken, or veggie rolls with chips and drinks. The two experiences become quite different now, simply because of the number of students. In Seattle, there is a group of five students with whom I have lunch. This is a good number for a more in-depth conversation. I normally prepare a few printouts with questions about how they save their files, name their folders, and other reproducibility issues, just to get them thinking about reproducibility. This is always well received by the students, and this time they give me ideas about how to do things better myself.

In Miami, the student group is much larger, approximately 25 or more, and I try to repeat out loud everyone's name and listen to their research topics. My takeaway is that this is a very broad department, with research ranging from cacao trees to cellular-plasticity animal models, all held together by themes of symbiosis in nature. I am hosted by two South Asian students, though, with whom I spend a lot of time speaking, and I try to understand their work-life balance, affordability concerns, career journeys, and future goals. I don’t think they are looking for advice, so I just listen.

2:00–4:00 PM – From here on, the two itineraries become somewhat different. In Seattle, I meet with one of my scientific heroes, who is the first senior scientist I've met during an invited seminar to ask me how I am doing and really mean the question. I tell her about the unexpected tenure pause at my university, and we discuss how we can help students write competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship applications. She also asks me several questions about my research from a cell identity perspective that I don't normally consider. Her questions remind me of a postdoc I worked next to during my PhD, who happened to be an intellectual descendant of this very professor at UW Seattle. I realize then how much we inherit our ways of scientific thinking from our academic mentors.

In Miami, I have back-to-back 30-minute meetings that go on until 5:00 PM with several graduate students and postdocs who attended my talk. I find myself in awe of how independently these young scientists think and how they are drivers of their own research questions. I think I am only beginning to learn now how to be a good PhD student. These students/postdocs teach me about their research on red and green bacteria in lakes that are indicators of water quality, peptides in mammalian systems, and research on Epichloë associations across different grass species. The conversations naturally veer into career paths and sometimes, institutional politics. I keep regretting not bringing a notebook to remember all these cool things I've learned.

The highlights of my visit(s)

4:00–5:00 PM – In Seattle, I meet with my student host and his advisor. This completes my meetings with three of the four plant biologists in the Biology department at UW. My host then takes me to the UW greenhouses. He tells me that he's been told he's a good plant guide, and I soon discover that he really is. These are teaching greenhouses housing plants from different climatic regions of the world. I see a cacao plant, a cotton plant, gigantic pitcher plants, but the best, the BEST highlight of my trip is the solitary baobab tree.

It is one of my life's greatest wishes to visit Madagascar and drive through the Avenue des Baobabs. (And if I can go to Socotra and see the gigantic cucumber tree, that wouldn't be too bad either!) But even if I never ever see the avenue, at least in this life, I got to see the tree. In the Desert Room of the teaching greenhouses in the basement of the Life Sciences Building at UDub Seattle. This tree doesn't seem to be doing too well though and has only a few leaves. Ah well, immigration struggles.

I leave the university, and my visit, with a dinner recommendation for a student-frequented café, Saint Bread, by Portage bay and a renewed enthusiasm for plant research.

5:00–7:30 PM – I go to dinner with four faculty members who are kind enough to spare their evenings for me. One of them has cultivated a garden as a butterfly waystation during their winter migration. We go to a Mexican restaurant ‘KoKo’ in downtown Coral Gables. Even though it's a weekday, the restaurant is quite busy. What we all find interesting is that the restaurant dedicates a small section of its menu to insect dishes: “LOS INSECTOS”. In addition to our entrées, we order a salsa made with ants, “SALSA DE HORMIGAS CHICATANAS”, and grasshoppers on corn tortillas, “TOSTADA DE CHAPULINES”. The salsa has a slightly bitter flavor, a smooth texture, and an orange color, but the grasshoppers are crunchy, very tasty, and almost indistinguishable from regular loaded nachos (but with extra protein).

I have a wonderful time listening to my hosts talk about how they structure their teaching, the first grants that helped them secure tenure, and the use of AI in classrooms. The latter is particularly interesting because I admit that I use AI myself, so how can I expect students not to? One of my hosts has a clear written classroom policy that allows students to use AI, but not for generating text. She also has an interesting assignment she has developed around scientific conversations with AI that in itself can be submitted for credit. Note to self, must follow up on that. The conversation isn't entirely one-sided either. They are interested in a course I developed and how I run it. We have lots to talk about.

On the drive back to the hotel, I ask one of my hosts whether Miami is the best place he has ever lived. Hands down, he says, Hawaii was the best. I find this unexpectedly comforting. Not even established academics end up living in the places they love most. Sometimes other priorities determine where we build our lives. I needed to hear that.

I thank all my hosts, and I mean it. The entire experience is something that cannot be bought. It is a gift freely given.

8:00 PM onwards – Ten minutes of stillness in the hotel courtyard, enjoying the Miami weather and watching people walk by. And then back to packing for the early morning return flight and, once more, the best sleep of my life.

The Week After

Send emails to thank my hosts.

Perhaps being memorable was never the point at all.

Author’s note: This post was edited for grammar and flow with assistance from artificial intelligence (AI). All experiences, observations, and ideas are the author’s own.