3 Minute Thesis winners

The public speaking competition cultivates students’ academic, presentation, and research communication skills, and develops their capacity to effectively explain their research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.

The event started in Australia in 2008, and is now run in more than 85 countries across the world, with the tagline of ‘An 80,000 word PhD thesis would take 9 hours to present. Your time limit... 3 minutes.’

The Faculty of Science judges had a tough time selecting the winners due to the high calibre of all the presentations. In the end, they chose one winner, one second place and two equal third place winners. The top two Faculty of Science contestants will compete in the University of Sydney Three Minute Thesis competition on 18 August.

The Faculty of Science winners are:

First place: Jordan Martenstyn, from the School of Psychology, who spoke about ‘When bulking up becomes a problem’.

Second place: Alice Shirley, from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, who spoke about ‘Hot Cows, Cool Solutions’.

Third place (equal): Eloise Spanner, from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, who spoke about ‘What Are the Odds: Predicting the Fertility Game’.

Third place (equal): Mezzalina Vankan, from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, who spoke about ‘Cutting through Cancer with Precision’.

The other Faculty of Science PhD students who presented at the faculty Three Minute Thesis competition are:

• Teleri Clark, from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, who spoke about ‘Speed Dating with CRISPR’
• Jordan Oh, from the School of Psychology, who spoke about ‘Statistical Reasoning: An Intuitive Skill in a Messy World’
• Josephine Massingham, from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, who spoke about ‘How many severed legs does it take to write a thesis?’
• Faysal Mehedi Hasan, from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, who spoke about ‘Grazing management decision: Mapping Australia's cattle feed base using liveweight gain’
• Tian Du, from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, who spoke about ‘Snakes on a (96-well) Plate’
• Olivia McRae, from the School of Chemistry, who spoke about ‘Science on stage: communicating science with improv theatre’
• Laura Haidar, from the School of Physics, who spoke about ‘Big Little Medicine: from Stardust to Scripts’
• Gargi Tyagi, from the School of Physics, who spoke about ‘Building the Quantum Internet: Integrating microwaves and light’