The TNQ Distinguished Lectures in the Life Sciences

TNQ Tech Limited is a technology a publishing services company in the area of scientific, technical and medical publishing (tnqtech.com). The company is headquartered in Chennai. TNQ runs an annual life science lecture series, bringing leading scientists in the life sciences, face to face with the scientific community in India. These lectures are planned in selected cities each year. The speakers have included several Nobel Prize winners and some who got awarded their Nobel Prizes subsequent to coming to India for the TNQ lectureship series. (https://tnqtech.com/lectures/).

When we took over the running of this series in 2015, it was suffering from poor attendance with a large percentage of the attendees not being from the science community. Additionally, despite conceiving of and funding this lecture series from inception, TNQ was almost completely unknown in the Indian science community

Our initiatives included:

1. Moving event promotion from entirely offline to almost entirely online (except for posters), saving expense and also reaching our target market of Indian science students in a focused manner.

2. Starting an online registration system, where registrants need to let us know which Institute they come from. This shift, ensured we were attracting interest from science students enrolled at the best academic Institutes in the country. It also gives us a real time indicator of interest levels in the key Institutes and shows us where our efforts need to be focused if we are getting a lower than average response from any Institute or Institutes. Additionally it gives us an accurate list of the number of attendees from each Institute, which in turn allows us to refine transportation arrangements to and from the lecture, that we make for students from any Institute with above a certain minimum number of registrants.

3. To ensure that registrants do not miss the lecture, we mail them a reminder the day before the lecture which also functions as their ticket to attend the lecture. This mail is required to be shown to our security staff at each auditorium to ensure entry. We also have spot registration at every auditorium for attendees without a prior registration, so we can track our audiences, while simultaneously expanding our registrant database.

4. This system has ensured a 30,000 and growing database of our registrants and is today the single largest database of the Indian scientific community.

5. We created and ran the social media presence for the lectureship series on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn which have jointly created awareness, engagement and traction for the series. Since 2017, we have been taking post lecture questions from the audience, on Facebook, which we project onto our on stage LED screen. This system is self policing since the question is displayed to the entire audience alongside the person’s name and photograph.

6. We have completely revamped the presentation of the lectures themselves, from the traditional projection on vinyl bordered screens to a 100% LED format driven by Watchout a contemporary multimedia software allowing us flexibility in what we display on our LED screen, utilising multiple inputs from the speakers presentation, to onsite cameras and online content (https://www.dataton.com/products/watchout).

7. We have successfully streamed the lectures online, from various locations to the TNQ offices in Chennai and Coimbatore.

8. We have also conceptualised and introduced, the Inspiring Science Awards, India’s only scientific published paper award for Indian science students, to run in tandem with the lectures, converting the company’s outreach to the Indian science community from a week long activity to a year round affair. (https://tnqtech.com/isa/)

9. The lectures now run to full auditoriums at every venue and TNQ is now an established brand in Indian science across the country.

We have staged these lectures successfully from 2015 to 2024 in Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Hyderabad.