Three Minute Thesis Competition helps doctoral students distill their dissertation for potential funders, employers—even their own families
By Patrick L. Kennedy
A helpful staffer clips a small microphone to the lapel of your power blazer, and just like that, things get serious. Bright lights shine on you. Judges make ready to take notes. A standing-room-only crowd of 100 falls silent and waits for you to start.
And now a timer is counting down, second by second, the three minutes you have in which to explain to a general audience the research you’ve been working on for four years.
Fortunately, you’ve pruned and practiced this speech for weeks. After a deep breath, you begin.
“Did you know that four out of every ten people suffer from a gastrointestinal disorder? That means in this room alone, dozens of us may be dealing with gut health issues right now. . . . ”
That was the experience of Dilara Caygara (ENG’26), along with nine other finalists in this spring’s Three Minute Thesis Competition in Boston University’s Photonics Colloquium Room.
“I was a little nervous,” Caygara says later, “but it was a good kind of energy. When people went on stage, I could sense they were passionate about their work, too.”
Three minutes and one slide
Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is an international program in which advanced PhD students learn to distill their dissertation research into a short, compelling presentation aimed at an audience of nonspecialists. Participants each get three minutes—180 seconds—and a single, solitary Powerpoint slide.
In this year’s newly relaunched BU edition of 3MT, a panel of faculty judges awarded Audrey Van Heest (ENG’26) first prize ($1,000) for her talk, “Sending in a Search Party: Molecular Sensors Screen for Cancer.” Joseph Guidry (CAS’26) garnered second prize ($500) for “Photographing the Perilous Fate of the Solar System.” And the audience voted to confer the People’s Choice Award on Caygara for “The Chickpea-Sized Clinic.”
For all contestants, the whole 3MT experience—including weeks of coaching, practice sessions and feedback before the final event—contains value even if they don’t win. They’ll be better prepared to communicate their expertise in all manner of settings, from job interviews to professional conferences to holidays with relatives.
“Doctoral students are often burdened with the curse of knowledge,” says Director of PhD Student Resources Abigail Nishimura, who holds a PhD herself, in biological anthropology. “They’ve studied their work for years and have become such experts, and 3MT provides an opportunity to step back and practice communicating that specialized knowledge to a general audience.” Nishimura and BU’s Graduate & Postdoctoral Success team, part of Graduate Affairs in the Office of the Provost, organized this year’s 3MT event at BU.
“If you can communicate it to a general audience, you’re empowered,” Nishimura says. “Even on a personal level. It forces you to remind yourself about the why, so you don’t get lost in the details of the very specific things you’re doing. ‘This is the why. This is the huge impact I hope to have with this work.’”
A future at-home tumor test
Van Heest is hoping to cure cancer—or to be precise, she hopes her work will enable clinicians to spot tumors sooner, when they can be treated. “Detecting cancer early can save lives,” she said in her 3MT talk, “but it is a huge clinical challenge. Early-stage tumors are often ‘quiet,’ meaning they’re too small to see on traditional scans and they don’t shed enough molecules into the blood for standard testing.”
With colleagues in the lab of Assistant Professor Liangliang Hao (BME), Van Heest has been engineering molecules that act as tiny sensors, picking up on signs of those “quiet” tumors. In the future she’s working toward, “Your doctor has prescribed a routine cancer screening test,” she said. “You’re at home, sitting at your kitchen table and you peel open your test kit. You bring an inhaler to your mouth and take a deep breath.
“Inside, tiny sensors work to track down tumors that might be hiding in your body. After an hour, you take a simple urine test—just like a pregnancy test. Your timer dings. You exhale, relieved to know you don’t have cancer.”
Reached after the competition, Van Heest says she expects her newfound elevator-pitch skills to be useful when, for example, meeting with busy hiring managers who have slightly different sets of expertise. “Even talking to other scientists in adjacent fields, it’s valuable to communicate quickly what I do, because PhDs are so specialized.”
Meeting scientists and nonscientists where they are
That ability to communicate and collaborate across interdisciplinary lines is an increasingly useful skill as more research teams take a silo-busting convergent approach to solving societal problems.
“There are times I need to speak to biologists about my electronic devices, and times I need to talk to electronics people about the biology,” says Caygara, who works with Associate Professor Rabia Yazicigil (ECE, BME). Building upon foundational ingestible capsule technology published by Qijun Liu (ENG’24), Caygara is currently developing future generations of a smart pill that combines electronics and engineered bacteria. The device is designed to survive stomach acids and report on the health of the entire digestive tract—a potentially less invasive and more effective method of monitoring inflammatory bowel diseases than today’s annual colonoscopy procedures.
In Yazicigil’s multidisciplinary WISE Circuits Lab, Caygara says, “I need to simplify my language to make sure everyone understands me. That’s challenging. Also I’m not a native English speaker, being from Turkey. These were my motivations to [take part in 3MT], get out of my comfort zone and go on stage to talk to people.”
Caygara rehearsed her pitch so often, enlisting friends as stand-ins for the audience, that “some of them memorized my speech,” she says with a laugh. Meanwhile, Van Heest says, “I can explain [my research] to my family now. They say, ‘I finally understand what you do!’”
This is no small thing. Conveying the benefits of STEM to friends and family prepares young researchers to serve as ambassadors for science. For example, they might be called upon to counteract medical misinformation, or simply address some lay listeners’ natural queasiness. After all, both Van Heest and Caygara will need to reassure the public that it’s safe to inhale or ingest tiny sensors. (In both cases, the sensors eventually exit the body.)
Moreover, as they potentially go on to teaching and mentoring roles, the ability to translate their highly technical work into plain terms might help these researchers inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.
“The more researchers can avoid jargon, the more they can demystify the scientific processes,” says Nishimura, “the more welcoming and inclusive a place higher ed and research can be.”