Jean-luc Doumont, an engineer from the Louvain School of Engineering and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford University, is a world-acclaimed expert on scientific communication. He is a popular instructor and is known for his no-nonsense approach, and for his highly applicable, often life-changing recommendations on a wide range of topics. He is also the author of Trees, Maps, and Theorems, a book on “effective communication for rational minds.”

That said, Jean-luc has ideas about how to live your life more efficiently in the fast paced world we live in today. Of course, books and websites offer so many tips on how to be more productive, but, perhaps, too many for us to absorb and act upon efficiently. In an effort to bring all these otherwise useful tips into a coherent strategy, he proposes a simple but solid model; through his talk he will illustrate this model in action with a diversity of examples and personal anecdotes.

João Pedro de Magalhães is a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool and leads the Integrative Genomics of Ageing Group. He holds a degree in Microbiology from the Escola Superior de Biotecnologia in his hometown of Porto (Portugal), and then obtained his PhD from the University of Namur in Belgium, where he worked in the Ageing and Stress Group led by Dr Olivier Toussaint. Following a postdoc with genomics pioneer Prof George Church at Harvard Medical School, in 2008 Dr de Magalhaes joined the University of Liverpool.

His research focuses on understanding the genetic, cellular, and molecular mechanisms of ageing. On our stage de Magalhães will share with us the latest developments in his research studies and will answer the most heated question: What is aging and how do we prevent it? He will help to unlock the realities of a world where we can manipulate the biological machinery of aging.

Michaël Van Damme is one of the finalist of the TEDxGhent PhD contest 2015. He works at the Department of Personnel Management, Work and Organizational Psychology, and his research focuses on how to teach people to communicate their ideas in a more effective and convincing manner. His scientific results already show that the way an idea is presented has three times more impact on an audience than the actual content of an idea. It parallels how the melody of a song sticks more with people than the actual lyrics.

Michaël combined his personal experience as an improviser and stand-up comedian with insights from his scientific research, and on our stage he will be on a mission to get qualitative ideas out in the open, and will present his method that he himself calls ‘comedycation.’