Campus community invited to watch fast-paced graduate student competition

When you’re passionate about your research, you enjoy an opportunity to talk about it with your colleagues. When that opportunity is only three minutes long, and you have to make your research understandable to everyone, it’s a little more challenging. For the audience, though, it’s a lot more fun.

Clemson’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition is back, and the fact it is virtual this year makes it more accessible than ever to the campus community. The online event is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Friday, November 20.

Twenty-nine graduate students representing every college will summarize and explain the relevance of their research in three minutes or less and will be judged on clarity, presentation, and more. Sponsored at Clemson by Graduate Student Government (GSG), the Graduate School, the Vice President for Research, and the colleges, the competition allows students to develop and hone communication skills they need as professionals but often don’t focus on as part of their usual studies.

The link to the competition is https://www.twitch.tv/clemsonGSG and all staff, faculty, students and community members are invited and encouraged to watch. The viewing platform, Twitch, does not require you to create an account to watch.

---

A similar event is being held the day before by the Clemson Post-Doc Association, wherein ten postdoctoral scholars present “Three-Minute Flash Talks” on their research. Viewers can log into Zoom at https://clemson.zoom.us/j/91050289524 just before
2 p.m. on November 19 to watch the one-hour event.

---

Cash prizes will be awarded, including one for People’s Choice, which the audience determines. The winner in the Ph.D. candidate category will compete against other universities at the Council of Southern Graduate Schools’ annual conference next year.

Last year’s winner, Nickolas Gregorich, is this year’s director of the Research Initiatives Committee, the GSG group responsible for planning the event. “It’s exciting for students to be able to tell the larger Clemson community what they are working on every day,” he said. “And the staff and faculty tell us they enjoy the event, too. Some say it’s their favorite day of the academic year.”

This year’s finalists, listed by college then by program:

Agriculture, Forestry & Life Sciences

Amber Stone: Animal & Veterinary Science

Joel Hamilton: Food, Nutrition & Packaging Science

Meredith Bean: Forest Resources

Manisha Parajuli: Forest Resources

Wendy Buchanan: Plant & Environmental Sciences

Enoch Noh: Plant & Environmental Sciences

Tony Reda: Plant & Environmental Sciences

Pawanjit Sandhu: Plant & Environmental Sciences

Ricardo St Aime: Plant & Environmental Sciences

Architecture, Arts & Humanities

Rutali Joshi:  Planning, Design & the Built Environment

Vincent Qiu: Planning, Design & the Built Environment

Saeideh  Sobhaninia: Planning, Design & the Built Environment

Behavioral, Social & Health Sciences

Pinar Ozmizrak: Healthcare Genetics

Kaitlin Mueller: Parks, Recreation & Tourism Managemen

Business

Hyunji Suh: Business Administration

Bob Wen: Economics

Education

Abby Baker: Learning Sciences

Emma Chiappetta: Teaching & Learning

Engineering, Computing & Applied Sciences

Amirreza Yeganegi: Bioengineering

Paritra Mandal: Biomedical Data Science & Informatics

Libby Flanagan: Biosystems Engineering

Omar Amer: Civil Engineering

Moazzam Nazir: Electrical Engineering

Chirath Pathiravasam: Electrical Engineering

Brennan Ferguson: Environmental Engineering & Earth Science

Reza Ghaiumy Anaraky: Human-Centered Computing

Moloud Nasiri: Human-Centered Computing

Jennifer Brown: Mechanical Engineering

Science

Lea Marcotulli: Physics