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April 02, 2015

Academic Idols: Ph.D.s Compete in Three Minute Thesis Championship

By Cindy Carroll / stell@cmu.edu

Eleven finalists will compete for top honors in CMU's second annual Three Minute Thesis Championship from 5 - 6:30 p.m., Tuesday,  April 7 in the Hillman Center's Rashid Auditorium. The competition also will be webcast live on the Libraries homepage.

3MT Thesis Three Minute Thesis is a research communication competition that challenges Ph.D. students to give a compelling presentation on their thesis and its significance in just three minutes, in language that anyone can understand.

At stake for these young researchers are research and travel grants to help further their work. Audience members may cast their vote for the People's Choice Award winner.

The 2015 Championship line-up is as follows:

  • Milad Memarzadeh, Civil & Environmental Engineering: “Probabilistic Learning and Planning Framework for Optimal Management of Systems Under Uncertain Environments”;
  • Michael Craig, Engineering & Public Policy: “Keeping the Lights On: Power Systems, Water and Climate Change”;
  • Vincent DeGeorge, Materials Science & Engineering: “Tomorrow’s Electricity: Stadium or Lawn Seating?”;
  • Sam Ventura, Statistics: “Solving the Identity Crisis”;
  • George Lederman, Civil & Environmental Engineering: “Good Vibrations: How To Protect Our Infrastructure”;
  • Madhumitha Ramesh, Biological Sciences: “How Do Cells Assemble the Ribosome Nanomachines?”;
  • Amit Datta, Electrical & Computer Engineering: “Transparency in Online Targeting”;
  • Annie Arnold, Chemistry: “Modified Graphene: Biodegradable Bone Implants”;
  • Gus Xia, Machine Learning: “Music, Mind and Machine: Expressive Collaborative Music Performance via Machine Learning";
  • Lily Morse, Organizational Behavior & Theory: “Exposing Fraud Vulnerabilities in Client-Auditor Relationships”; and
  • Garrett Stack, English: “Damming the Romantics.”

Join the event on Facebook.