Finalists for the Spring 2019 Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition at Georgia State University were selected after a preliminary round on March 5, sponsored by the Office of the Associate Provost for Graduate Programs and the University Library. The final round will be held on March 25 at the Centennial Hall Auditorium, 100 Auburn Ave. N.E.
3MT is a research communication competition developed by the University of Queensland in Australia in 2008. The premise of the competition is to develop academic, presentation, and research communication skills. It supports the development of students’ capacities to effectively explain their research in language appropriate to an intelligent but non-specialist audience.
Through this competition, 3MT celebrates the discoveries made by graduate students and encourages them to further build skills in communicating the importance of research and scholarship to the broader community now and in their future careers.
During the first round, held at CURVE in Library North, 27 graduate students gave talks. Twelve students made it through the first round.
In the finals, Master’s and Ph.D. finalists across various fields will compete separately, and each have exactly 3 minutes to present their research in a clear and compelling way.
Judges will award 1st, 2nd and 3rd place to the best presenters in each category. The audience will cast their vote for the People’s Choice winner. Admission to the finals is free; RSVP at https://3mtfinal2019.eventbrite.com.
Finalists include:
Doctoral Finalists
| Finalist | Program | College | Thesis Title |
| Mary Fernandes | Clinical Neuropsychology | Arts & Sciences | Associations Between Pupillary Response Patterns to Emotional Faces and Self-Reported Social Anxiety |
| Casy Walters | Developmental Psychology | Arts & Sciences | Spoken vocabulary outcomes of toddlers with developmental delay receiving parent-coached augmented language intervention: a phonetic description and analysis |
| Thaddeus Johnson | Criminal Justice and Criminology | Andrew Young School of Policy Studies |
Making Sense of the School-to-Prison-Pipeline: Connecting Exclusionary School Discipline, Susceptibility, and Race |
| Luqian Wang | Astronomy | Arts & Sciences | Detection and characterization of hot subdwarf companions of massive stars |
| Ramesh Manyam | Computer Science | Arts & Sciences | Machine Learning Model for Predicting Readmissions Following Cardiac Surgery |
| Sergey Klimov | Biology | Arts & Sciences | Machine Learning Approaches to Predict Recurrence of Aggressive Tumors |
| Charlie Harper | Educational Leadership |
Education & Human Development | The Perceptions and Experiences of Elementary Georgia Science Ambassadors: What Educational Leaders and Policy Makers Need to Know |
Master's Finalists
| Finalist | Program | College | Thesis Title |
| Chad Moore | Religious Studies | Arts & Sciences | Inclusive Theologies and Transgender Refugees and Asylum Seekers |
| Amirah Hurst | Biology | Arts & Sciences | Effects of Early Life Opiate Exposure on the Brain |
| Michelle D’Amico | Public Health, Biostatistics Concentration | School of Public Health | Examining Associations between Availability of Paid Sick Leave and Health Outcomes in a National Sample of Older Adults |
| Joanna Caldwell | Public Health | School of Public Health | Outness, Discrimination, and Severe Mental Illness Among LGBTQ Southerners |
| Sara Gardner | Anthropology | Arts & Sciences | An Analysis of Experimental Bone Tools, Swartkrans South Africa |
| Laini Whitton | Public Health, Epidemiology | School of Public Health |
Attitudes and Risky Sexual Behavior among Youth in Kampala, Uganda: Empirical Analyses of Risk Factors by Gender |
| Alexus Moore | Sociology | Arts & Sciences | The Effect of Social Support on Problem Substance Use within Black Homeless Youth |
To learn more about last year’s winners, please visit https://provost.gsu.edu/2018/03/27/graduate-students-take-top-prizes-at-georgia-states-spring-2018-three-minute-thesis-competition/.
– Jeremy Craig, Office of the Provost