Lightning Talks

ACTC invites all registered postdoctoral scholars and assistant professors to submit Lightning Talks along with their poster abstracts. Approximately a half dozen postdoctoral scholars and assistant professors who submit Lightning Talks will be chosen to give 20-minute invited talks in the main conference session.

  • To prepare a Lightning Talk, record up to three minutes of narration accompanying three to five slides. A Lightning Talk is similar to ACS LiveSlides. You may use any software which captures both audio narration and video of your slides. Save or convert the recording of your Lightning Talk into mp4 format and title it with your name, e.g,. "Ted Lasso.mp4". Further instructions and tips regarding Lightning Talks can be found here. Several recording options are described here. A sample lightning talk can be found here.

  • To be eligible for the competition, please submit your Lightning Talk by June 13.

Eligibility and evaluation of Lightning Talks

A panel of judges will evaluate Lightning Talks. The results of this competition will be announced in early July. Lightning Talk contributors who are selected to give invited talks need not prepare and present a poster. All current postdoctoral scholars and assistant professors are eligible for this competition. We especially encourage submissions from assistant professors who started or are starting their faculty positions in the years 2020, 2021, and those who plan to start new positions in the fall of 2022. The category of assistant professors also includes similarly situated staff scientists at national labs.


Submitting Lightning Talks

A Google account will be required to upload abstracts and Lightning Talks. Some institutions, including Stanford and Berkeley, use Google accounts already; participants from those institutions and others should be able to use their .edu addresses to upload materials, i.e., you are not required to use a gmail address, but you must use a Google account.

ACTC 2022 registrants will receive a link to a submission form to transmit abstracts and Lightning Talks. Abstracts and Lightning Talks do not need to be submitted at the same time, although they should be submitted using the same submission form. If you wish to submit a revised Lightning Talk, please email bayareatheory@gmail.com.

All Lightning Talk submissions will be uploaded with an unlisted privacy setting onto our YouTube channel. Links to abstracts and Lightning Talks will be made available to registrants shortly before the conference begins.