Giving A Talk

This page is meant to be a useful resource for our invited speakers. Thank you for agreeing to give a lecture!

Your travel accommodations will be booked and/or reimbursed by the university that invited you. Please have your primary host help you plan your visit, who will know what the university-specific policies are.

Typically our speakers spend Tuesday at BU, Wednesday at MIT (where the seminar will take place in the evening), and Friday at Harvard. Each school will have a student host who will plan your schedule for the visit to their school. Please let them know if you have specific faculty you’d like to meet with. Additionally, be sure to pass along any specific accommodations or dietary restrictions.

When preparing your seminar, please aim for a run time of roughly 75 minutes. Your seminar should start with a  45-minute pedagogical section covering the theory behind your research. In its early days, speakers have even given chalk talks! After this section, there will be a 15-minute break for questions and a short intermission. The second section (30-minutes) then covers your recent research results. We also encourage discussion at the end.

If possible, we would like to have your talk’s title and abstract well in advance of your visit. This allows us to update the website promptly and to advertise your upcoming visit and seminar. Your abstract may (by no means required) contain key references. We will also link to the website of your research group. Additionally, we typically display a photo of you from your website next to your abstract. If you provide us with a specific photo you’d like us to display or wish it to be omitted completely, we will be happy to oblige!

Preferred Dates: September 1st (Fall) and January 15th (Spring)

In the early days of this seminar series, the TheoChem website hosted a copy of each talk’s lecture notes. We would like to restart this tradition. Please consider sending your slides to the TheoChem Organizing Committee Email (found on the Contact page) or to your primary host. This can be done after your seminar.