This week we had a wonderful conversation with Dr. Bruce Kirchoff who is a scientist, improviser, and storyteller. He teaches young scientists to speak clearly and intelligibly about their research. His book Presenting Science Concisely (https://presentingscienceconcisely.com/book) draws on the relation between the scientific process and story structure to present science with impact.  

Bruce is also Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where he taught courses in plant diversity, flowering plant identification, and evolution. His research combined insights from biology and cognitive psychology to improve the reliability of plant description and classification. As a software designer he developed visual, active learning software to rapidly teach plant identification, and chemical structures. He has won the UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Charles Edwin Bessey Teaching Award from the Botanical Society of America, and the Innovations in Plant Systematics Education Prize from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists. He has studied scientific communication at the Alan Alda Center for Scientific Communication and teaches it through the UNC Greensboro Speaking Center, where he is a Faculty Fellow. He also teaches workshops in storytelling and improv and, before his retirement, was the faculty advisor for the UNCG student improv club.

You can follow Bruce and learn more about his work here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brucekirchoff/

https://twitter.com/1andOnlyBruce

https://www.youtube.com/@sci-comm (Bruce’s YouTube channel)

Transcript: https://go.unimelb.edu.au/s8ys