Years of grueling research.
Months of writing and revising.
Hours of stressful dissertation defenses.
And just three minutes to present it all?
That’s not exactly the typical Ph.D. path—unless you’re one of the George Washington University graduate students who participated in the 6th annual Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition on Feb 22.
The high-speed contest challenged students to swiftly summarize their research in language that was engaging and appropriate to a non-specialist audience—with cash prizes and a spot in a national competition at stake.
“You have spent a lot of years on your doctoral work already, and you know your thesis inside out,” said Suresh Subramaniam, vice provost for graduate and postdoctoral affairs, as he welcomed the 24 students from six different schools to the competition. “But the challenge here is: How do you present all of your work in three minutes to an audience that is not in your field?”
The 3MT contest, first launched in 2008 by the University of Queensland, is now held in over 600 academic institutions across more than 65 countries worldwide. The Columbian College of Arts & Sciences (CCAS) brought the contest to GW in 2019. This year marked the first time students from all GW schools were eligible to participate.
The 2024 winner was Leah Kaplan, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in systems engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science. For her project, “AI Behind the Wheel: Work, Economics, and Preferences in the Era of Autonomous Vehicles,” Kaplan received $1,000 in prize money. She will also have the opportunity to compete in the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools’ regional tournament this spring.
Kaplan’s research looked at the expansion of artificial intelligence into driverless taxis and the consequences of substituting a human for AI technology. Over four years, she interviewed workers in driverless taxi companies and discovered that, while the services may be driverless, they are not worker-less. Indeed, Kaplan explained, the emerging technology had significant repercussions for, among others, highly skilled mechanics, remote monitors, accident response teams and customer service agents.
“Driverless cars have the potential to dramatically disrupt transportation patterns and reshape cities and communities,” Kaplan said. “By gaining early insights into the impacts of different types of driverless cars, we create the opportunity to proactively shape societal outcomes toward desirable futures.”
Prachi Mahableshwarkar, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in cognitive neuroscience at the CCAS Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, won both the second place $750 prize and the People’s Choice $500 prize for her project, “Investigating How the Human Brain Understands Spatial Information in Images.”
Mahableshwarkar researched how the human brain rapidly extrapolates 3D spatial information from 2D images. Evaluating a series of experiments with more than 3,000 participants, she found that people can accomplish spatial tasks like determining the distance of an object in just 125 milliseconds.
“Our brains are doing so much computation continuously that makes it possible for us to navigate and interact with the world with ultimate ease,” she said. “I’ve always felt like we take this insane ability for granted. So when I was first exposed to visual cognition research during undergrad, I knew this is what I wanted to study.”
The $500 third place prize went to Caitlin Bailey, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in social and behavioral sciences at the Milken Institute School of Public Health.
Bailey’s project, “The Future of Physical Activity Guidelines,” looked at the timing of physical activity and its relationship to health outcomes, such as BMI and cardiometabolic risk factors. She discovered that for young adults, morning activity (6 a.m. to 12 p.m.) was linked to lower cardiometabolic disease risk, regardless of total time spent in activity throughout the week.
“I see a future where time of day-based physical activity guidelines exist, and they are tailored to individual factors like age and sex, so that everyone can maximize the benefits associated with physical activity, despite busy schedules and competing priorities, to live longer healthier lives,” she said.
Other participants in the contest were: Samantha Ammons (environmental health); Ramaa Chitale (global health); Jenna Clements (cancer biology); Darren Dolan (chemistry); Shatakshi Gupta (economics); Alex Horkowitz (mechanical and aerospace engineering); Alexandra Laing (educational leadership and administration); Li Liang (finance); Emad Mashayekh (water resources engineering); Muhammad Mehdi (human and organizational learning); Rebecca Robbins (environmental health); Abbey Salvas (industrial organizational psychology); Laura Santacrose (public health); Julie Sapp (translational health science); Caleb Schmotter (political science); Maria Jose Talayero Schettino (environmental health); Anmol Taploo (mechanical and aerospace engineering); Wen-Chien Yang (global health); Ibrahim Yildiran (mechanical and aerospace engineering); Sara Youssoufi (mechanical and aerospace engineering); and Guannan Zhai (statistics).
Presentations were judged on criteria such as whether students clearly described their results and conclusions, and whether they conveyed enthusiasm for the topic, captured the audience’s attention and exhibited sufficient stage presence. Under contest rules, participants could display a single static PowerPoint slide but were prohibited from using sound, video or props of any kind. All presentations had to be in spoken word, with no raps, poems or songs allowed. Competitors who exceed the strict three-minute time limit could be automatically disqualified.
Kaplan, a fellow with GW’s Co-Design of Trustworthy AI Systems program and an affiliate with the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS), credited her GW colleagues for collaborating on AI technology research. While paring her research details into her first place three-minute speech, Kaplan drew from her background as “a theater kid at heart” who grew up performing in musicals and plays. “It was so fun to get out from behind my desk and be up on a stage again,” she said.
This year’s panel of judges were CCAS Professor of Physics Harald W. Griesshammer, who has served as a judge for each of the six GW 3MT Competitions since 2019; Professor of Prevention and Community Health Lorien Abroms, the associate dean for Ph.D. and M.S. programs at the School of Public Health; Jonathan Eakle, department chair and associate professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development; Senay Agca, chief diversity officer and professor of finance at the GW School of Business; and Vesna Zderic, department chair and professor of biomedical engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science.