Winner of the Göttingen Coimbra Group’s “Three-minute thesis competition”
An 80,000 word PhD thesis would take 9 hours to present. Their time limit… 3 minutes.
One doctoral project – years full of work, research and excitement but only three minutes to present it.
Thirteen PhD students from Göttingen participated in the Coimbra Group’s “Three Minute Thesis Competition” that took place for the third time at the Göttingen University on 13 February 2020. With interesting and entertaining presentations, all candidates tried to win over both audience and jury to get the chance to join the finals in Montpellier in June 2020.
The evening was filled with a broad spectrum of fascinating presentations. The topics ranged from the understanding of the dynamic of brain cells and the discovery of cool spots on the surface on stars, via the First World War and the Lutheran mission societies in the early 20th century to how hand prosthesis can be improved.
These exciting impressions from different departments and institutes did not make it easy for the jury to decide, but Selina Bruns was able to convince them with her presentation about “Sustainable economic development of smallholder farmers in the larger Mekong region”. Selina Bruns is doing her doctoral research on farm management in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development (Graduate School Forest and Agricultural Sciences). She also convinced the audience with her presentation: for the first time the audience had the opportunity to vote online for a people’s choice winner.
The runner-up was Madhura D. Ketkar with her presentation “Why is a football always a football?”. Madhura D. Ketkar is doing her PhD research at the European Neuroscience Institute about the network dynamics of fruit fly brains.
Neil G. Singh from the Department of General Microbiology reached the third place with his presentation “Do we understand life enough to create it?”. He is doing his research about proteins and enzyme in bacteria.
The event was moderated by Benedict Wild, himself doctoral student at the German Primate Center. In the jury, Prof. Dr. Achim Dohrenbusch and Prof. Dr. Jörg Stülke represented the Göttingen graduate schools GFA and GAUSS. Furthermore, Benjamin Bühring, part of the Public Relations Unit, and Prof. Dr. Thomas Kneib, dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics, were part of the jury.
Now it is up to the Coimbra Doctoral Studies Working Group in Brussels, who will select three finalists out of all institutional winners of Europe for the live competition in Montpellier.
The videos of most of the Göttingen candidates of this years 3MT Competition can be found here (LINK)