skip to content

Centre for Trophoblast Research

 

For Attendees

Two weeks prior to each journal club meeting, a link to the selected article will be emailed out to those on the journal club mailing list and to all members of the CTR. This will ensure that everyone will have a chance to read the article before the meeting. If you have trouble accessing a PDF of the article, please contact Priscilla Day-Walsh.

At each meeting, the presenter spends approximately 20-25 minutes explaining the premise of the chosen article and why (or why not) they deem it to be important to the field. Attendees will then collectively discuss and critique the chosen paper. The meetings are fairly informal to encourage discussion throughout the presentation. Meetings take place at 4pm according to the schedule and usually run for about an hour.

You do not need to be a member of the CTR to attend or present at the journal club.

All meetings of the 2020-2021 season will take place online over the video conferencing platform Zoom (free download). The Zoom meeting invitation will be sent out to the mailing list prior to each meeting. If you are not a CTR member and wish to receive these emails, please contact Priscilla Day-Walsh or Andreea Cristian.

For Presenters

Two weeks before your presentation date, the organizers will email you to request the article title that you wish to present. Please respond within a week's time so that your talk can be properly advertised to CTR members and journal club attendees.

Presentations are usually prepared using Powerpoint slides so that figures from the articles can be displayed for the audience. Prior to discussing the article details, you should provide sufficient background information so that those who are not experts can understand what is being discussed. How the article contributes to our understanding of placental or trophoblast biology and pregnancy at large should also be discussed. Your presentation should be between 20-25 minutes in length. Please expect that audience members will ask questions throughout your presentation, which is why the meetings will often last between 45 min to 1 hour.

Presenters should try to choose an article that is not directly related to their own research and that comes from a high impact journal (e.g., Nature, Science, PNAS, eLife, Development, etc.). The selection of an article that is not obviously connected to the trophoblast field but has implications for the research of CTR members is also encouraged. For a list of previously presented articles, click here.

Meetings will take place over the video conferencing platform Zoom. Please familiarise yourself with this platform prior to your presentation. The organisers can help you orient yourself. The organisers will host the meeting and allow you to share your screen with the attendees so that they can see your presentation as you discuss the article. The organisers will monitor verbal or written questions from the audience and interject accordingly. 

For the full benefit of everyone involved, we strongly encourage presenters to attend the journal club meetings on a regular basis.

To encourage junior members to share their thoughts, we would really appreciate it if group leaders could hold their comments until we have had comments from junior members.

If you have any questions, please contact Priscilla Day-Walsh (pw516@cam.ac.uk) or Andreea Cristian (adc90@cam.ac.uk)