Three Minute Thesis

The three minute thesis competition (3MT)was started by the University of Queensland, Australia. The premise is people get PhDs by focusing really hard on one very specific problem for about 5 years. In the process they get very good at communicating complicated ideas in very technical language to the few hundred other people on the planet who are deeply invested in that tiny problem. Often that kind of focus comes at the expense of communicating clearly with the other 99.997% of the world's population about what they are doing and why it matters. As an exercise in concise accessible communication the 3MT challenges doctoral students to explain their dissertations in under three minutes.
Emory has been holding a 3MT competition for three years. I participated last year and made it to the finals. It was a good experience and I learned a lot about trying to make very basic science sound cool to the general public. This year I competed again presenting about looking for clues about aging by studying muscle nuclei. My presentation won the People's Choice Award which was very exciting. First place went to a woman studying the effects of flame retardants on growth in children. Second place was a tie between a project on gene therapy for hemophilia and one studying differences in the HIV virus between individuals. The winner of the written competition was studying times when governments stop providing municipal services and companies take over as a way of maintaining there product line. It was fun to listen to all the presentations and now immortal glory is mine.