Rose Hoberman

Communication and Soft Skills Support

Contact information

Telephone numbers:

Office: +49 (0)681 9303-9121
Home:  +49 (0)681 686-5441
Mobile: +49 (0)163 373-9377

For additional contact information see my official MPI-SWS profile page.

Services Provided

Communication Skills: Courses

• Scientific writing: currently a semester-long class offered once a year. Focuses primarily on writing issues and a little on English issues. Appropriate for students and post docs, native and non-native speakers.
• Presentation skills: currently a semester-long class offered once a year. Appropriate for students and post docs, native and non-native speakers.
• English reading groups: currently we meet once a week for an hour, year-round. The focus is on non-technical vocabulary, pronunciation, and general verbal communication skills. Appropriate for non-native speakers.

Soft skills: Workshops

• How to design and present scientific posters. Once every two years.
• How to write a review of a scientific paper. Once every few years.
• Other soft-skills topics such as how to correct student writing (for faculty), how to TA effectively, academic job hunting, time and project management, etc. Sporadically.
• Cultural workshops, like cheese tasting and wine tasting. Sporadically.

Writing Feedback

• Providing feedback and comments on intermediate drafts of papers or sections of papers
• Editing conference submissions or final drafts of camera-ready papers
• Assistance with CV's, emails, proposals, grants, or other written documents in English
• Writing Conferences

Note: If you would like me to edit a paper, please send me an email letting me know how long the paper will be, what type of paper it is (conference paper submission, journal article, camera ready copy, etc.), and what time constraints you have. Please try to give me at least 48 hours notice, so that I can plan my schedule and fit everyone in.

Presentation Taping and Feedback

• Feedback on regularly scheduled practice talks, focusing on communicative effectiveness and English
• Videotaping and debriefing practice talks

Note: If you would like me to attend a practice talk, please send me an email letting me know how long the talk will be, what the talk is for, and whether you would like the talk to be videotaped. Please try to give me at least 48 hours notice. Also, please print out a copy of your slides for me, and bring them to the practice talk.

Other

• Language assessment: By request, I will conduct a general assessment of your spoken and/or written English, and help design a self-study program to address the areas which need the most improvement.
• Library: I maintain a digital resource library and a physical library of books, DVDs, and software. These resources cover academic and technical writing, scientific presentations, English pronunciation, CV and job search information, English vocabulary enrichment, general English learning, various soft skills, and more.
• Webmaster: I am currently maintaining the MPI-SWS webpage. If you spot any errors or have suggestions for improvement, please email me.
• Wiki Czar: I maintain the portion of our internal Wiki which contains information helpful to those who will be joining MPI-SWS. These pages include information on the process of moving to Germany, administrative matters, finding accomodation, and getting settled in at MPI-SWS, as well as general information about life in Germany.

Publications

Journal Publications

Refereed Workshop Publications

• Rose Hoberman and Dannie Durand. The Incompatible Desiderata of Gene Cluster Properties
  In Proceedings of the 3rd RECOMB Workshop on Comparative Genomics (Mclysaght and Huson, eds.), Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, Springer-Verlag. Volume 3678, 2005; pp. 73-87.
  

• Rose Hoberman, David Sankoff, and Dannie Durand. The Statistical Significance of Max-Gap Clusters
  In Proceedings of the 2nd RECOMB Workshop on Comparative Genomics (Lagergren, ed.), Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, Springer-Verlag. Volume 3388, Jan 2005, pp. 55-71.
  

• Elena Eneva, Rose Hoberman, and Lucian Lita. Learning Within-Sentence Semantic Coherence
  In 2001 Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2001)