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Evolution@Vanderbilt

Inviting an External Speaker

How-to Guide for Inviting a Visiting Speaker

Inviting a visiting speaker can be an exciting and nerve-wracking experience – it’s also a great way to build connections in your field. Here鈥檚 a step-by-step guide for inviting a potential collaborator for an ESI journal club visit. Some example email templates are below.

  1. Identify a potential collaborator
  2. Come up with three reasons you/ESI/EVOST/VU should invite this speaker
  3. Talk to your advisor about inviting this speaker and get their blessing
  4. Reach out to Andy and CC your advisor with the requested speaker
    1. You must give 6-months lead-time. We will try to work with you on shorter notice, but there is no guarantee
    2. Provide the reasons you want to host this speaker
    3. If there are dates that you prefer or dates that do not work, include them
    4. Indicate that you will be responsible for hosting the speaker and all that it entails (link to hosting page)
  5. Once you have approval, send the invitation to the speaker and CC Andy and your advisor

Example Email to Andy

Subject: Journal Club Speaker

Greetings, Andy,

I hope this email finds you doing better than ever! I would like to invite a potential collaborator to visit in [Semester, Year] for a journal club visit. My three reasons for wanting to invite this speaker are:

  1. [Reason 1]
  2. [Reason 2]
  3. [Reason 3]

I have run this by [Advisor] (CCd here), and they agree this would be a fruitful visit. I understand that if this visitor is approved and accepts our invitation, I will be responsible for hosting their visit.

Thanks!

[Name]

Example Invitation Email to External Speaker

Subject: Invitation to 天美传媒官网

Dear Dr. [Speaker],

I hope this email finds you well! I am happy to invite you to the Evolutionary Studies Initiative at 天美传媒官网 in the [Semester] of [Year] as a speaker in our Evolutionary Studies Journal Club.

We are an interdisciplinary group of scientists across the university that study evolution or use evolutionary concepts in our work, and which includes not just biologists, but also law professors, anthropologists, economists, and political scientists (to mention just a few). An integral part of our activities is our journal club. during these meetings, we discuss research papers, talk about ethics and best practices in scientific research, and invite external speakers to engage our community. We strive to have these meetings engaging and discussion-oriented, though a classic talk with time for questions at the end is perfectly acceptable for external speakers. There will be students and trainees there, and so we are asking speakers to make the talks as accessible as possible.

[TOP REASON FOR INVITATION]. [SECOND REASON FOR INVITATION] [e.g., We found the work you do with the evolution of cobra venom super useful and would love to learn more about the applications to biomedicine!]

Our journal club meets Fridays at 3:30pm CST and we ask speakers to prepare an hour of material – be it 50 minutes with 10 minutes for questions or an hour long discussion. We can currently offer a $500 honorarium. We have the following dates available:

  • [LIST OR TABLE OF DATES]

Please let me know if this speaking opportunity is of interest and if you have any windows of time that would be more suitable, and we can take it from there.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Best,
[Your Name]