Inaugural Three-Minute Thesis competition celebrates graduate research

The average thesis defense lasts around two hours. However, last Thursday, ten Stanford Ph.D. candidates had just three minutes to make their case.

At Stanford’s inaugural Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, graduate students across four out of seven University schools faced the challenge of clearly, concisely and compellingly presenting their research to a non-specialist audience in under three minutes. Favour Nerrise, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in electrical engineering, took home the grand prize and People’s Choice award, earning $5,500 for her presentation on artificial intelligence and early brain disease detection.

Tamri Matiashvili, a fourth-year student in economics, placed second for her presentation on the first-ever female physicians from the Russian Empire and their lasting impact on the medical field. Kristen Abels, a fourth-year student in chemical engineering, placed third for her proposal for a more sustainable method of lithium recovery. Matiashvili and Abels earned $3,000 and $1,000 in prize money, respectively. 

“I really wanted to challenge myself to be able to deliver a scripted speech, which is something we never learn,” Matiashvili said.

University president Jonathan Levin ’94 emceed the fast-paced event, which featured a panel of five Stanford faculty judges. Among them were Dean of Research David Studdart and applied physics and chemistry professor W. E. Moerner, a 2014 Nobel laureate in chemistry. 

Following a video pre-selection round in late January, ten finalists were chosen to work with oral communication coaches to refine their pitches for the live event in Hauck Auditorium. With an engineering background, Nerrise was especially motivated by the challenge of communicating her work beyond its technical contributions.

“Our mentors who helped us develop our speeches really encouraged us to think differently,” Nerrise said. The coaches pushed candidates to consider why non-experts should consider their work, Nerrise added. 

In addition to the strict time cap, finalists were only allowed one static slide to support their pitch. To add a fun twist, each finalist chose a walk-up song, mimicking the energy of a baseball game entrance. Picks ranged from “Memories” by Maroon 5 to “Life is a Highway” by Rascal Flatts. 

A professor at the University of Queensland created the Three-Minute Thesis competition in 2008, inspired by the three-minute shower timers used during a severe drought in Queensland, Australia. Since its inception, the competition has spread to over 900 universities in over 85 countries worldwide.

Other topics spoken about at the event included cancer treatment, the American dream, computer-animated hair, plant stem cells and infrastructure in tropical rainforests.

“Particularly [in a Ph.D.], you’re just narrowing down the most specialized knowledge, and to be able to broaden out and figure out how you can communicate that out to a broad audience in a way that excites them about research is an incredible skill,” Levin said at the event. 

“Having this event here at Stanford is really a nice way to give this group of students a chance to go through that experience of working on communicating out the work that they do,” Levin said.

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