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Innovative Research Meets Concise Storytelling at 3MT Finals

Ten doctoral students lit up the stage as they raced the clock to explain research from fighting cancer to training robot teams to giving AI a sense of touch — all in just three minutes. The ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV Libraries’ Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Championship, held March 25 in McConomy Auditorium, brought together finalists from across campus and challenged them to make their cutting‑edge work clear and compelling for a general audience.

This year’s winners included:

• First place: Raouf Belkhir, a psycholinguist completing the and student in the Department of Psychology
• Second place and Alumni Choice Award: Christopher Blum, Department of Chemistry
• Third place: Lara Abdelhmohsen, Biomedical Engineering
• People’s Choice Award: Anish Pyne, Biological Sciences

The event, which is in its 11th year at Carnegie Mellon, started at the University of Queensland in 2008 and has been adopted by over 900 universities across more than 85 countries. Helen and Henry Posner, Jr. Dean of the University Libraries , who brought the competition to CMU, served as host of Wednesday’s finals.

Belkhir’s award-winning presentation, “When No Error Isn’t the End of the Story,” explained his research focused on preserving parts of the brain that produce speech during brain surgery. The doctoral student from shared evidence from thousands of trials of awake neurosurgery. He simplified his work to help the audience understand its significance, using metaphors like highway traffic to explain the steps of speech production and how they can be affected by stimulation during surgery.

“Most of us are able to speak and produce words, and we probably rely on our ability to speak more than most people would think. In certain patient populations, when that ability is at risk, it's a very scary thing,” he explained. “My work is just one example of efforts toward trying to alleviate that risk in those patients, to ensure the best possible outcomes.”

For Belkhir, 3MT was a chance to practice explaining key ideas at the intersection of science and medicine. It also was a chance to connect with students from other programs.

“It was especially cool to hear about some of the robotics research that is happening at this institution,” he reflected. “To see those presentations and talk to those presenters was a really great opportunity. I’m glad I was able to make some connections with people I might not otherwise get to meet.”

As a child, Blum’s parents introduced him to TED talks, and that served as his first exposure to science communication. 

“I’ve always really liked the idea of learning about an overarching topic like that — how you can dip your toes in and start to learn what words and concepts mean, and then decide if you’re interested in the topic,” he said. “I really enjoyed being able to pass that forward as I put my own presentation together and figured out the best way to connect with the audience.”

In the Mellon College of Science, Blum studies cancer treatment, and he’s working on a precise way to kill cancer cells that doesn’t harm healthy cells. His delivery method involves special messengers disguised with DNA. The disguise changes the way these messengers interact with other cells: healthy cells ignore them, but they latch onto cancer cells.

Blum’s relevant topic, plus his straightforward explanations, resulted in a presentation that resonated with both the judges and the alumni audience. 

“I’m just trying to get the anti-cancer drugs where they need to go,” he said. “Breaking it down like that, in a way that’s applicable and easy to understand, really helped my presentation come together.”

Abdelmohsen decided to participate in 3MT to practice public speaking and challenge herself to stand in front of a group of people and explain her work. 

“I’ve always had a fear of public speaking, but I wanted to get better at it,” she said. “How can you make an impact if you can’t help people understand what you’re doing? Communicating your research is so important.”

The Ph.D. student researches sickle cell disease, specifically ways to predict stroke in adult patients with the condition. Breaking this work down for a general audience helped her improve her science communication — and she also saw it as an opportunity for advocacy.

“One of my goals today was to represent patients with sickle cell disease,” she explained. “Some people have never heard about the disease, so it's really important that we can communicate the importance of our research, and what we are doing for different communities, to people who are not in our field so that they can offer support for what we're doing.”

For Pyne, winning the People’s Choice Award was a great honor.

“The Three Minute Thesis competition is all about presenting your research to a general audience, so I’m glad I was able to communicate with the audience in the auditorium and that they voted for me,” he said.

Last year, Pyne watched three of his friends and fellow Mellon doctoral students compete in the , and that’s when he knew he wanted to participate. When the preliminary registration was announced he got to work crafting a talk about his microbiology research of bacteria and drinking water systems.

“One of my primary goals, both in pursuing a Ph.D. and also as a long-term career goal, is to make science more accessible,” he explained. “It really inspired me that this platform challenged me to cater my talk to be understood by anyone and everyone. You don't need to be an expert in my subject to benefit from the knowledge of what I’m doing.”