How to Introduce a Speaker

Alec Jacobson

February 10, 2026

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When speaker introductions are done poorly, the speaker is left embarrassed by their mispronounced name or is facing an audience that is barely awake. Done well, they raise the audience energy in the room for the talk and make the speaker feel welcome and confident. Academic talks are a terrible place to learn how to introduce speakers: we mostly do it poorly. A much better model is a live comedy or talk show, where the host brings out each comic with applause and excitement.

If audience didn’t clap after your intro, then it didn’t work.

Before the talk, confirm with the speaker:

If I'm session chairing at a conference where I might not get a chance to meet the speaker, I do this in advance by email. Often speakers are happy to find out that the session chair cares about getting their name right. Some will even send an audio recording of their name.

Before the talk, plan what you're going to say.

The length of the introduction depends on the event. For session chairing at a conference, I am just going to announce the paper title, author names, affiliations and who is giving the talk. For an invited seminar talk or a keynote, the introduction may be a couple minutes long. Some common elements to hit are:

I will usually write down a short outline before the introduction to make sure I hit all points.

During the introduction

If you really mean it and don't hit the points above, then you not only make some of the audience feel dumb but you also deprive the speaker of confidence and energy boosting complements. If you say this and then go on to give an introduction, then it still patronizes the audience and at worst makes it seem like maybe the speaker does indeed need an introduction and they're not that special after all.

This is my favorite advice. It scores every time. This is straight out of hosting/introducing performers:

Even if the speaker's name is written up on the slides, the audience will build anticipation during the introduction and cathartically release it with applause when you end with their name. It's a clear indicator to the speaker “now, it's your turn to talk.”

Example

Welcome, everyone. Thank you for coming to our distinguished colloquium series. My name is Alec Jacobson and it's my great pleasure to introduce our speaker today. She is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Bingbong. She is known for her early work on the geometry processing of turtle shells. Currently, she runs a leading research group on banana boat simulation. She recently won the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Winner Winner Chicken Dinner Award for her work on the physics of fried chicken. She has chaired SIGGRAPH three times in a row. She is also known for her work in the community organizing speaker events food-graphics researchers. I first met her at the Minneapolis airport. We'd both missed our connecting flights. I'd just given my first ever conference talk on lettuce leaf modeling. During our delay, she asked me what I was working on next. Turned out she was also thinking about the challenges of dinosaur kale modeling. For four and a half hours, we geeked out, writing out integrals on the back of airport restaurant napkins. By the end, we'd nearly written our first paper together. We've been collaborating ever since. Please join me in a warm welcome for our speaker today, Prof. Sandy Cluck. 👏

And in note form: