Inaugural Three-Minute Thesis Competition Celebrates Graduate Research On a recent Thursday, ten Stanford Ph.D. candidates stepped up to a unique challenge: presenting their complex research in just three minutes to a non-specialist audience. This was the inaugural Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, a global academic event that requires participants to distill years of work into a concise and engaging presentation. Favour Nerrise, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in electrical engineering, emerged as the grand winner, earning a total of $5,500 for her presentation on using artificial intelligence to detect early brain diseases. Second place went to Tamri Matiashvili, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in economics, who spoke about the historical impact of the first female physicians from the Russian Empire. Kristen Abels, a fourth-year student in chemical engineering, took third place with her proposal for a more sustainable method of lithium recovery. Matiashvili and Abels received $3,000 and $1,000, respectively. Matiashvili shared her motivation for participating, highlighting the value of mastering a scripted speech, a skill that is rarely taught in academic settings. “I really wanted to challenge myself to be able to deliver a scripted speech, which is something we never learn,” she said. The event, emceed by Stanford University President Jonathan Levin, featured a panel of five faculty judges, including Dean of Research David Studdart and W. E. Moerner, a 2014 Nobel laureate in chemistry. In January, a video pre-selection round narrowed down the candidates from a pool of applicants to the ten finalists. These finalists then worked with oral communication coaches to refine their pitches for the live event held in Hauck Auditorium. For Nerrise, who has an engineering background, the challenge was particularly appealing. “Our mentors who helped us develop our speeches really encouraged us to think differently,” she said. The coaches pushed the students to consider the broader implications of their work and how to make it relevant to a general audience. To keep the presentations dynamic, each finalist was allowed only one static slide and a walk-up song, much like the entrance of a baseball player. Songs ranged from Maroon 5’s “Memories” to Rascal Flatts’ “Life is a Highway,” adding a touch of fun to the otherwise intense atmosphere. The 3MT competition, originally created by a professor at the University of Queensland in 2008, was inspired by the three-minute shower timers used during a severe drought in Queensland, Australia. The competition has since spread to over 900 universities in more than 85 countries worldwide. Other topics covered at the event included cancer treatments, the American dream, computer-animated hair, plant stem cells, and infrastructure in tropical rainforests. University President Levin emphasized the importance of such competitions, particularly for Ph.D. students. “In a Ph.D., you’re just narrowing down the most specialized knowledge, and to be able to broaden out and figure out how to communicate that to a broad audience in a way that excites them about research is an incredible skill,” he said. Levin also noted that hosting the 3MT at Stanford provides an invaluable opportunity for students to practice and refine their communication skills. “Having this event here at Stanford is a fantastic way to give these students a chance to work on disseminating their research to a wider audience,” he added. The competition not only showcased the depth and breadth of research at Stanford but also underscored the critical need for clear and effective communication in the scientific and academic community. By engaging a general audience, the 3MT competition fosters interest and understanding in complex and important research topics.