Nine finalists have made it through the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition heats that took place on February 26 and 27. They will move on to compete in the Final Competition which is being held on Wednesday, March 6, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm at the Robert B. Schulz Lecture Theatre (St. John’s College, 92 Dysart Road, Fort Garry Campus).

The public and the University of Manitoba community are invited to cheer on our innovative graduate students as they compete for the First Place ($5,000), Second Place ($2,000) and People’s Choice ($1,000) awards. Each competitor will have three minutes, using only a single slide as an illustration, to clearly explain the nature, goals and significance of his or her research. Challenging? You bet it is. It takes years for a thesis to be researched and finalized--never mind synthesizing it down to a mere three minutes to get the information across to a lay audience.

Heather Campbell-Enns
Interdisciplinary Cancer Control (Doctoral)
Decision-making among women with breast cancer

Marcos Cordeiro
Biosystems Engineering (Doctoral)
Agricultural water management for the future

Amy Flasko
Natural Resources Institute (Master’s)
Sociogenetics: Exploring fine-scale social structure of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou)

Julia Gamble
Anthropology (Doctoral)
Stress and health in medieval Denmark: The tales our teeth can tell

Leah (Wong) Guenther
Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering (Master’s)
Engineering a synovial fluid analogue for the wear testing of orthopaedic bearing materials

Jennifer Juno
Medical Microbiology (Doctoral)
HIV and exhaustion: Why the immune system gets tired

Amy Scott
Anthropology (Doctoral)
Bad to the bone: An exploration of ill-health in the human skeleton

Anthony Signore
Biological Sciences (Doctoral)
When blood runs cold: Paleophysiology of oxygen delivery in extinct Arctic megafauna

Christopher White
Physiology (Doctoral)
Heart in a box: Optimizing donor heart preservation for transplantation

The emcee for the Final Competition will be Richard Cloutier, news director, CJOB. Judges will be: Janice Lederman, chair, University of Manitoba Board of Governors and Executive Chair, Innovate Manitoba; Paul Samyn, editor, Winnipeg Free Press; and The Honourable Erin Selby, Minister of Advanced Education and Literacy, Province of Manitoba and MLA for Southdale.

Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) is a research communication competition originally developed by The University of Queensland. 3MT® challenges graduate students to consolidate their ideas and research discoveries so they can be presented concisely to a non-specialist audience.

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