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Animal Breeding and Genomics group represented in national FameLab final

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May 10, 2021

Malou van der Sluis, a PhD candidate at the Animal Breeding and Genomics group, is one of the three winners of the Wageningen University & Research (WUR) heat of FameLab.

FameLab

FameLab is an international science communication competition, organised by the British Council and Cheltenham Science Festival. In this competition, young researchers, PhD candidates and advanced MSc students can present their science story in a three-minute pitch, without the use of a PowerPoint. This year, the WUR heat was organised online. The applicants from WUR first participated in an online public speaking training and were then asked to make a video recording of their pitch.

Bob the bird

Malou decided to participate, as she wanted to share her research with a wider audience and was curious to learn more about presenting without a PowerPoint. She made a video recording of her pitch, in which she explained her research on tracking the activity of individual broilers. To make her research more relatable for a general audience, she introduced Bob the bird as one of the chickens she tracks in her pitch. For this, she used two plastic chickens, one larger chicken and one small chick, representing Bob at different ages.

Online award ceremony

On Friday the 30th of April, the online WUR award ceremony took place. From the thirteen WUR participants, two jury winners and one audience winner were selected. Sophie van der Vlugt and Malou van der Sluis were selected as the jury winners and Rose Pinto won the audience award. They will receive a communication masterclass and move on to the national final.

National final

On the first of June, the Dutch final will take place, organised by the Eindhoven University of Technology. Here, the three Wageningen winners will compete against representatives from other Dutch universities. The winner of the national round will participate in the international final in the fall.