What can you distil into three minutes?
For the twelve PhD students competing in the ANU Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, it’s all the time they have to explain years of research to a room full of people – with a single static slide and no specialist knowledge assumed.
Tergel Namsrai, from the ANU National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH), won first place at The Australian National University (ANU) 3MT Grand Final this year.
But behind all the practice, nerves and applause lies something more enduring than the competition itself.
For many researchers, being part of a 3MT is the first time they get asked not merely what they study, but why anyone else should care.
“I’ve always found it harder to explain my research simply than to talk about brains, sleep, or statistics,” says Namsrai, who studies the association between sleep and brain health.
“I knew it was important to communicate my research in a simple and concise way, but I did not really know how to do it well.”
So Namsrai challenged herself by signing up for 3MT. “I figured opting out would be worse than failing,” she says.
After several workshops, rounds of feedback, and lots of practice, Namsrai started to understand what effective science communication looks like.
As she thought less about explaining her research and more about telling the story behind it, Namsrai found herself returning to someone who had inspired her from the beginning – her grandmother.
“My grandmother is someone I deeply admire and hope to be like one day,” Namsrai says. “She was fierce, witty, and kind, and lived through enormous changes in the world.”
Her grandmother became the centrepiece of the single slide she used for 3MT, and, from there, Namsrai shared her journey into deciphering the role of sleep in neurodegeneration and cognitive decline.
“Finding a photo of her turned into a family project, with relatives in Mongolia searching through old albums,” she says. “It gave us a chance to reflect on our memories of her together.”
“We are running out of cures” for malaria and other parasitic diseases, Cecilia Nie from the ANU Research School of Biology says in her three-minute presentation, titled ‘Spicing up cholesterol: a novel cure for parasitic diseases’.
“My research aims to rethink how we deliver antiparasitic drugs to make them more effective, more targeted and harder for resistance to develop,” says Nie.
Using the analogy of wrapping up her dog’s pills in cheese to adhere medication, she explains the role of cholesterol in the promising new antiparasitic drugs.
“For my PhD I play the role of a Michelin Star chef,” Nie says. “Except my diners are parasites. I serve them with different cholesterol drug combinations and see what tickles their fancy.”
It’s a clever way to make her work more engaging and digestible to a broad audience and earned Nie both Runner-up from the ANU 3MT judging panel and the People’s Choice award voting by the audience.
Not only is the 3MT a chance to tell the wider community about their PhD work, the program is a great opportunity for PhD candidates to hone their communication skills.
“Even if you never plan to do science communication as part of your career, being able to tell the story of your research is a valuable skill,” says Namsrai.
“The process forces you to think about what really matters in your research – and how to explain it clearly.”
Perhaps that's the real challenge of the 3MT. It’s not just about compressing years of work into 180 seconds, but discovering that behind every hypothesis, dataset and statistical analysis is ultimately a story about people – and how research can make their lives better.
This article was adapted from Three minutes, one slide: Telling the stories behind research, published on the ANU National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health website.
