For Researchers Preparing Conference Presentations,
Job Talks or Pitches
The PresentBetter Program
Your Lab's Research Reputation Travels With Every Talk
When your graduate students present well, hiring committees, funders, and collaborators notice. When they don't, it reflects on your training. The PresentBetter Program systematizes quality so excellence becomes automatic. In the end, everyone benefits.
Banda Khalifa, MD, MPH, MBA
Physician Epidemiologist, Johns Hopkins University
I had the privilege of witnessing Andy's exceptional seminar on public speaking at Johns Hopkins. Andy showcased a profound grasp of confident public speaking and demonstrated a commendable ability in scientific communication. The resources he provided were invaluable, and I wholeheartedly recommend Andy for any endeavor that seeks to blend the art of public speaking with scientific precision and passion.
Gala True, PhD
Professor, Tulane University
Andy is a genius at helping academics and researchers create better presentations and become better presenters in the service of their work. I have worked with Andy twice. He helped me transform both the slides and presentation from a stiff, typical academic talk into a compelling story. He also imparted tips and tricks about creating and giving presentations that I'll be using for the rest of my career.
David O. Prevatt
Professor, University of Florida
As a structural engineering professor, I’d long spoken within the familiar walls of my discipline. With Andy’s help I’ve challenged myself to reframe complex engineering for a broader audience, blending rigor with narrative to spark genuine engagement. If you want to elevate your presentations—whether it’s a conference keynote or a public forum—Andy is the one to help you find your authentic voice and make every word count.
Eleonore Fournier-Tombs, PhD
Head of Anticipatory Action and Innovation, United Nations
His training was incredibly empowering and I went from being nervous and a little bland to feeling quite confident. We learned a combination of general principles and specific techniques that I continue to draw upon in my presentations and lectures now. I would highly recommend him to anyone who wishes to work on speaking with passion.
Chris Buddle
Professor and Associate Provost, Academic Office, McGill University
Andy was easy to work with, critical and helpful - constructive in a supportive way. If you're considering working with Andy, go for it!
What Other Professors say...
You might train 50 grad students over your career. This program was built by training that many scientists per month for 10 years, across dissertation defenses, 3-minute thesis competitions, job talks, and grant pitches.
We’ve established a repeatable 5-step workflow that scaffolds presentation development with built-in structure: core message clarity → outline approval → key visuals → full-length practice → final sign-off. At each step, automated feedback forms guide peers toward giving more useful input (not just "talk slower" or "can you go back to your methods slide, I think I missed something").
You have more valuable ways to spend your time than teaching trainees presentation skills.
Here's the problem: you're a strong presenter, but training others to present well is a different skill. Most of what you do is tacit knowledge—you can do it, but you can't always teach it. And even if you could articulate every framework, you don't have the time, energy, or sample size to build a scalable system.
You get a dashboard that shows real-time progress for every student in your lab. You see where they are in the workflow, how much time they've spent on each module, and what feedback they've received. You intervene strategically, not reactively.
The frameworks you use instinctively—how to earn credibility, trigger curiosity, design slides for comprehension—are now explicitly taught. Your students stop depending on you to explain the same principles every semester. They learn the system once and apply it forever.
Your feedback time drops by 60%. Lab practice sessions become productive instead of painful. And your students walk into conferences, defenses, and job talks with the kind of clarity and confidence that makes people ask, "Tell me again… Which lab are you from?"
You tell students to start prep early.
They procrastinate.
You tell them to focus on the most important result.
They struggle to find a concise message.
You tell them to keep their visuals relatively simple and clear.
They build complicated and near impossible to quickly understand ones instead.
You dedicate lab meeting time for practice talk feedback.
Peers end up focusing feedback on the wrong things.
You then meet one on one with them to give the feedback they needed.
You end up reworking parts of their talk for them.
Your current systems are too time consuming and produce inconsistent results.
It’s not that you don’t try, you do. You set them up with a process to follow. Start early. Get feedback from your peers. Practice with each other. You think, “I figured this out, they should be able to as well.”
Arav Saherwala
McGill University
Andrew's mentorship has helped me develop strong research communication and public speaking skills! It has helped me craft other presentations for lab meetings, workshops, and conferences. In fact, I believe working with Andrew has helped me win numerous awards at regional, national, and international conferences.
Mohammad Hadavi
PhD candidate. McGill University
Andy creates a fantastic atmosphere, always brimming with energy and filled with invaluable tips! In February 2024, I had the incredible opportunity to present my research at CatIQ Connect 2024 in front of ~200-300 people from industry, academia, and government, where I was awarded as one of the top three students.it's amazing to see how much I've grown, especially considering English isn't my first language. His guidance has been instrumental in my journey, and I'm truly grateful for all his support along the way
Atia Amin
PhD candidate. McGill University
The first time I met him, I was utterly captivated. His enthusiasm, spontaneity, ideas, and, of course, his impeccable public speaking skills overwhelmed me. Over the course of a year, Andy became my mentor, imparting his knowledge of public speaking to me. He guided me through every facet of the art, from mastering stage presence to harnessing body language and modulating my voice to engage with the audience effectively. I owe a great deal of my success to Andy.
Ramin Farhad
PhD candidate.
University of California, San Francisco
Throughout my PhD I’ve attended several talks and workshops on how to create and deliver an effective presentation. Andy’s presentation workshop was indeed the most comprehensive and transformative session He was quite efficient with the short time we had and shared numerous nuggets of wisdom. And the best part was the delivery of the information, which not only easily made it to my long-term memory, but also served as a living example of how to effectively present data.
Pratik Mahajan
PhD student in Political Science Yale University
Through your presentations skills course and the 3MT competition, you equipped me with the skills and confidence to share my passion for research on indigenous peoples in India. This was immensely helpful in an academic conference I presented at last summer, where I followed your advice to present the results first to make the presentation more engaging. While this is only the beginning, I wanted to share my utmost gratitude for your encouragement and mentorship at a nascent stage of my journey!
What gradiate researchers say...
The end result?
You end up spending the time you should be writing grants or papers or supervising their actual research, guiding them through building a presentation, and then at the end wondering how much they’ve really learned. The same issues repeat, presentation after presentation, cohort after cohort, and you start to wonder if this is just the way it is. You sometimes think: this isn’t what I signed up for, I wanted to run a research lab not teach presentation skills to my students. Shouldn’t someone else be doing this?
The real issue:
Presenting research at a conference or for a dissertation defense or for a job talk is different from in-class presentations students are used to doing. Presenting your own research is not a test and it’s not an oral version of a journal article either.
Effectively presenting your own research is different, and they don’t understand how to do it well. You know this, but you are unsure how to quickly and consistently explain it to them, and then get them be able to execute on that understanding.
You just want them to be clear, engaging and have a healthy balance between confidence and humility.
The PresentBetter Program has 2 steps to get them there.
It starts by teaching the frameworks and mindset shifts that you instinctively use:
Don’t trim down your talk. Build up, from a better foundation.
Great talks don't begin with a 30-minute draft that you gradually cut down to 10 minutes. They begin with five questions that force clarity: What's the problem? What's your hypothesis? What's your approach? What's your primary result? What's the significance? From there, you build a one-sentence throughline—"In order to [solve X], I am [doing Y], by [approach Z], so that [impact + outcome]." This becomes their anchor. Everything else scaffolds from it.
Don’t over-explain your methods. Just earn credibility.
Audiences don't suddenly trust you because you walked them through your process in painstaking detail. They triangulate it from micro-signals: the depth of your insights, how you qualify claims, the research you cite, your past experience, and—yes—your delivery. When they understand how credibility is actually assessed, they stop front-loading methods and start embedding proof where it matters.
Don’t follow the journal-article structure. Design for memory.
Journal readers jump to results and skim backward. Presentation audiences can't do that—they experience your talk sequentially, in real time, with no rewind button. They’ll learn to trigger curiosity early, thread it through their talk, and close where they started so the story sticks. This isn't "dumbing down." It's respecting how human comprehension scaffolds and memory works.
Don’t treat slides as your notes. Use them as audience visuals.
Slides are for your audience during the presentation, not for them, and not as takeaway notes. They will learn to toggle between slide-centric moments (when a visual propels the teaching) and speaker-centric moments (when they need audience eyes on them, not the screen).
Don’t be objective 100% of the time. Let them hear how you feel.
Monotone delivery—whether in tone or pace—triggers disengagement. Audiences need to see and hear authentic emotion: surprise at an unexpected result, frustration with a stubborn problem, excitement about an implication. This doesn't mean "be unprofessional." It means be human in the moments that matter.
Why AI Makes Rethinking More Important Than Ever
ChatGPT can write your abstract. Claude can pen your whole script. Gamma can design your slides. Descript can edit your practice video. AI will do whatever you ask—beautifully, quickly, and efficiently.
But here's the problem: AI is a frequency model.
It learns from the most common patterns in its training data. And the most common academic presentations follow the broken model: methodology-heavy, slide-dependent, emotionally flat, structured like a paper.
If you prompt AI to "improve my research talk," it will give you a polished version of what most people do. Which means you'll sound exactly like everyone else.
From uncertain presenter to TEDx:
Jason's journey, told by Jason
The researchers who will stand out in the AI era aren't the ones with the best tools (we all already have them). They're the ones who know how to think correctly about presentations first, so that when they use AI, it accelerates the right patterns instead of amplifying the wrong ones.
That's what this program does. It rewires your approach so AI becomes a multiplier, not a mimic.
Duration: 2.6 hours
Investment: $89
Format: Self-Paced
12 Modules.
4 Entry Points.
16 Lessons Built for What Actually Works.
This program is designed around the talk you're preparing right now—whether that's a conference presentation, dissertation defense, funding pitch, or job talk.
Pick your frame.
Choose 1 of 4 presentation types you're preparing for: conference, defense, pitch, or job talk. Each frame gives you a unique perspective through which to navigate the 12 modules, so you're learning what matters most for your specific context.
9 Core Ideas.
The mental models that shift how you think about content, credibility, connection, visuals, and delivery. These aren't tips—they're frameworks. Once you understand them, you'll never go back to the old model.
3 Key Practices.
How to practice efficiently (not just repeatedly), manage anxiety with research-backed strategies, and get feedback that actually improves your talk instead of just identifying problems.
Pre-Trained AI Agents.
At key decision points—after you draft your one-sentence throughline, after you design a key visual, after your first-minute opening—you can trigger an AI agent trained on this framework to give you structured feedback or alternative versions. You're not asking ChatGPT to guess. You're using an AI agent that knows (almost!) everything I know.
5-Step Workflow (for PIs and institutions).
If you're a PI or running a lab, there's a structured process that scaffolds trainee presentations from core message to conference-ready, with peer feedback loops and sign-off gates built in. You stay in the driver's seat without having to micromanage every step. (Learn more here.)
10+ Years
10,00+ Researchers Trained
500+ Workshops
Built on 15+ Years of Successful Presentations.
The PresentBetter framework has been personally taught to 10,000+ researchers across universities, institutes, and labs. It's helped doctoral students win 3-minute thesis competitions, secure dissertation funding, and land competitive postdocs. It's helped senior researchers present to policymakers, pitch to investors, and teach their own trainees how to communicate without sacrificing rigor.
This program distills that work into 16 total modules built with input from PhD and postdoc trainees who've been through it and PIs who've coached alongside it.
What you're getting:
The Framework
The frameworks that feel obvious once you see them—but that most researchers never learn because they're too busy surviving feedback loops that quickly identify problems, but struggle to provide solutions.
Producation Quality
16 videos that might just blow your socks off. Premium video, integrated whiteboard-style visuals, exclusive worksheets, and pre-trained AI agents that know exactly what to do and how to do it.
Lifetime access
Lifetime access for $89 USD. No monthly fees. Just the program, the exclusive AI agents, and the workflows you need to master your next talk.
Rethink Presentations. Then Let AI Accelerate.
You've spent years earning your expertise. Don't let a broken presentation model—or a well-meaning AI trained on broken patterns—undermine it.
Learn to think correctly about presentations first. Then every tool you use, every practice session you run, and every talk you give will compound instead of just repeat.