Ph.D. candidates present research at annual Three Minute Thesis competition 

10 Stanford Ph.D. students took the stage at Hauck Auditorium on Thursday to present their dissertation research in three minutes or less at Stanford’s second annual Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition.

AJ Phillips, a sixth year Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering, won first place for his presentation on a retinal implant designed to restore vision to people blinded by retinal degeneration.

“Getting people to understand how blind persons have to move through the world, and what it might mean to restore a meaningful level of vision to them, is hopefully impactful,” Phillips said after the event.

Ibukun Ajifolokun, a third year Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering, won the second prize and the People’s Choice award for her presentation on injectable hydrogels that improve combination vaccine delivery. “I’m just happy,” she said backstage. “I feel very proud of myself — the work that was put in and just having fun and being myself. Honestly, that paid off.”

The competition, hosted by the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and emceed by University president Jonathan Levin ’94 for the second consecutive year, served as the signature event of Stanford’s first-ever Graduate Student Appreciation Week. The top three contestants received prizes of $5000, $3000 and $1000. Ajifolokun won an additional prize of $500 as the People’s Choice Award winner. 

The 3MT competition anchored the Thursday of Stanford’s first Graduate Student Appreciation Week, a six-day slate of events running April 13 to 18. The week included programming from all seven schools.

According to Liz Silva, associate vice provost for graduate education, this year’s competition drew a stronger applicant pool than the inaugural event last April.

“People understood what we were going for,” Silva said. “They understood what was going to resonate, what was going to be a successful application.”

The ten finalists were selected from a university-wide pool based on self-submitted videos, then paired with oral communication coaches to refine their presentations.

Their topics spanned from fourth-century incantation bowls to dark matter detection to urine-derived fertilizer — a range that Levin highlighted.

“The breadth they covered — an incredible range of different topics from demon bowls in the fourth century of antiquity to searching for dark matter to slow-release vaccines,” Levin said to The Daily after the event. “It was all of Stanford in three minutes per part.”

The event also carried weight amidst a political climate distrustful of higher education. Silva noted that the competition was conceived, in part, as a response to growing public skepticism about the value of academic research.

“It’s just never been more critical to help the public, society, the wider world understand the importance and the impact of the work that we’re doing,” Silva said. “People don’t read scholarly work. They need something that’s more accessible.”

One of the more striking revelations from last year’s competition, Silva said, was that several finalists had no memory of their time on stage.

“Three of the six that were in front of me said they didn’t actually remember being on stage, because they’d rehearsed it so much and it was so intense,” Silva said. She compared the phenomenon to accounts of people unable to recall their own weddings.

This year’s competitors showed similar signs of emotional intensity. Ajifolokun said her Apple Watch registered a heart rate of 150 beats per minute just before she stepped on stage. “But once I saw smiling faces, I was like — this is for me. This is fun,” she said. 

For students in the audience, the event offered a window into work outside their own disciplines.

Chad Serrao, a 4th year Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering, said watching presentations about research in fields he knew nothing about was one of the highlights of the competition for him.

“By being here today, they made their field [accessible] to someone who’s not even within that field, and that feels good,” Serrao said.

He added that the experience made him wish for more informal opportunities to learn about peers’ research across campus. 

“I feel like we could do this in a more… informal way,” he said, “and just to be able to learn about the sort of exciting research that we’re doing here would be, I think, exciting.”

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