Ten doctoral students shared their complex research and made connections across disciplines during the championship round of Carnegie Mellon University's Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, held Tuesday, March 11 in McConomy Auditorium of the Cohon University Center. This year’s finalists, who hailed from departments across campus, were challenged to present their theses for a general audience in under three minutes.
First place was awarded to Vivian Shen from the Robotics Institute. Second place went to Junwon Seo from Materials Science and Engineering. Third place was awarded to Huda Usman from Chemical Engineering, who also won the People’s Choice Award selected by the in-person audience in the auditorium. Justin P. Miner from Mechanical Engineering won the Alumni Choice Award, which was chosen by online votes from alumni watching the livestream.
The event, which is in its tenth 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 Keith Webster, who brought the competition to CMU, served as host of Tuesday’s finals.
Shen, a doctoral student in the School of Computer Science, chose to focus on the broad applications of her research to best connect with a general audience. She spent the first portion of her presentation explaining the importance of virtual reality — the field she works in — and how it can impact people’s lives.
“We focus on very specific, small problems in our research — I think that's true for Ph.D. students everywhere,” she explained. “And we know why our work is important, but other people don't. So I emphasized things that a lot of people in my field will already know implicitly, but maybe aren’t so clear to other people, to show why what we're doing is important.”
Shen’s research explores haptics, designing and testing technologies that create an experience of touch by simulating pressure, weight, and texture for a user. As she outlined in her presentation, her work could impact anyone who uses a device like a cell phone, expanding the available feedback options from simple vibrations to a variety of different physical sensations. The technology also has specialized applications that can lead to advances in various disciplines — for example, through medical and pilot training simulations, or immersive history lessons.
The competition gave Shen the opportunity to connect with other researchers and see where overlap occurs. “I feel like I don't get to interact with too many people outside the School of Computer Science, but there are people working in disciplines like engineering whose work intersects with what we do within SCS,” she said. “3MT reminded me of all the cool research that's happening at CMU, and at the same time, that the problems we're working on are so interdisciplinary. People that I hadn't met before today are often working toward similar goals.”
This was Seo’s third year participating in 3MT, and his first time advancing to the championship. The Ph.D. student from the College of Engineering attributes his win to increased confidence and additional experience — he graduates in two months and has a deeper understanding of his research and how to communicate it than ever before.
Seo centered his presentation around an accessible analogy — that, just as a baker bakes bread by combining dough shapes in an oven, engineers are now able to “bake” complex geometries needed for custom parts used in machinery like rocket engines.
Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing metals, allows Seo to create shapes that weren’t possible before in a cost-effective, environmentally friendly way. The method eliminates unnecessary material waste and offers unique opportunities for refinement. And while his research is complex, he knows the importance of communicating about it in an accessible way so others can understand his work and why it matters.
“Doing great research and sharing that research with the public are completely different things,” he said. “What I’m doing in the lab is important, but it's also important to help a general audience understand the research so they can make use of it. I think that's one of the most important parts of becoming a researcher.”
Usman, also a student from the College of Engineering, has wanted to participate in 3MT for years — and after she proposed her thesis in fall 2024, she knew the time was right. “The more I advanced in the process, the more understanding I had about where my work sits in the field,” she explained. “I knew I was ready to boil my research down in three minutes and find the most important message I could give an audience.”
The message Usman chose is about the importance of microbes, many of which still aren’t fully understood by scientists today. To help solve the mystery, she’s developing a new nanoculture technology to capture different types of bacteria and study them, gaining valuable information about their behaviors.
“Once we have that set up, we can study what the bacteria are doing and how they're doing it,” Usman said. “We can also find out if they're secreting novel antimicrobial compounds — and a lot of them are. These novel antimicrobial agents can combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria and save a lot of lives.”
Miner heard about 3MT through the Libraries’ Tartan Data Research Alliance, launched in fall 2024 to create a community of practice around research data management. He was preparing to propose his thesis this semester and decided 3MT would help him make his ideas more concise and weave a story about the importance of his work into his presentation.
Miner receives funding from NASA for his research, which looks at how 3D printed parts respond to forces that are applied over and over, much like airplane wings or engines will experience in aerospace applications. By studying these parts in practical situations, he is able to gain a better understanding of where weaknesses develop and how to make them more reliable.
3MT gave Miner the chance to share this work with a large audience of alumni from across CMU. “My research captures emergent technology that's very applicable to manufacturing, which is a common area that our alumni work in,” he said. “As a result, it’s clear alumni connected with my presentation and understood the importance of my research.”
