3 minute thesis uiowa

College of Education

Three minute thesis (3mt) 2021 finalists q&a and winner announcement.

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) challenges graduate students to communicate their research in three minutes or less in non-specialist language. Contestants represent a diverse array of disciplines and areas of study and reflect the passion and thirst for discovery common among all of Iowa's graduate students. Learn more about the 3MT Competition !

Join us to meet the 3MT finalists for a Q&A and find out who the winners are for the 3MT 2021!

Location : Zoom at bit.ly/UI3MTFinal2021

When : Friday, November 12th at 12:00 pm Central Time

Events Calendar

• Graduate Students
• Informatics
• #UIGradSuccess #UI3MT
• Departments
• Carver College of Medicine
• College of Engineering
• College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
• College of Nursing
• College of Pharmacy
• College of Public Health
• Department of Computer Science
• Graduate College

Three Minute Thesis: Distilling Your Research

Sep 8, 2023

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Save to My Events

Virtual Event

https://apps.its.uiowa.edu/swipe2/site/grad/signin/virtual/grad-prodev2

This session will briefly introduce the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition and help you to create a summary of your work that can help you beyond 3MT. The skills you will use in a successful 3MT presentation can also be used to win grants, sell ideas, and build your professional network. 

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa–sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact in advance at

Login with Facebook

Login with Google

Login with HawkID

Obermann Center for Advanced Studies

Obermann humanities 3-minute thesis (3mt).

To prepare for the 3MT, we recommend attending  workshops hosted by Graduate College August 9 through September 29  and watching  videos of 3MT Workshops   hosted by the Graduate Success Center.

Designed to feature the work of UI humanities grad students

NOTE: As of August 2023, this program is no longer active. 

Our 3MT is specially designed to feature the work of UI humanities graduate students. The 3MT event challenges graduate students to articulate their complex research clearly and concisely to non-specialist audiences in three minutes or fewer.

The presented research can be a student’s thesis or PhD work, research related to an internship or other outside project, or research pertaining to a specific class. The only requirement is that it is the student’s research and that it has a humanities focus. 

The winner of the Obermann Humanities 3MT receives $250 and directly advances to the  campus-wide 3MT  final on November 10, 2023. (Obermann Humanities 3MT participants may or may not choose to participate in the  campus-wide preliminary 3MT contest  on October 5 and 6. The winner of the Obermann Humanities 3MT, however,  will  advance to and be required to participate in the UI finals.)

The Obermann Humanities 3MT uses the same rules and judging criteria as the campus-wide 3MT hosted by the UI Graduate College.  View the full judging criteria on the Grad College website.   Our judges will be Christine Getz (Associate Dean for Graduate Education and Outreach and Engagement, CLAS), Roland Racevskis (Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities, CLAS), and Kristy Nabhan-Warren (Associate Vice President for Research, OVPR). 

Several pre-recorded workshops  are available to help participants prepare for the 3MT. 

Guidelines & Resources for Participants

Judging criteria, presenter guidelines, tips, and video resources for students participating in this year's Humanities 3MT.

Past Humanities 3MT Winners

Kudos to our past winners!

Berkley Conner (pictured above) won our 2022 competition.

In the News

Bethanny sudibyo wins 2021 humanities 3mt, ui grad student takes home first place for humanities-based three minute thesis competition.

View more articles about the Obermann Humanities 3MT

College of Engineering

Mechanical engineering.

Undergraduate Program

Graduate Program

Our Expertise

6 months post graduation:

Employed, continuing education, or not seeking

Median salary

Department News

Boeing hires Iowa engineering alumnus as CEO

Venanzio Cichella named outstanding young alumnus by alma mater

Vitali's research could improve student career opportunities in U.S. Navy 

Mechanical engineering student Kenneth Reichert builds miniSims

ME PhD student receives Iowa Space Grant Consortium fellowship for air traffic research

Engineering events.

College of Engineering Welcome Fair

Study Abroad Fair

Fall 2024 in-person engineering career fair, department of mechanical engineering.

3MT competition helps graduate students more effectively share their research

Moala Keshei Bannavti has firsthand experience with PCBs in schools.

“I grew up in a town with a lot of underrepresented minorities, and we were all from low-income families,” she says. She and her classmates went to an old school with air that likely had high levels of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs), an invisible but common compound that she didn’t realize can cause an array of health problems until she became a graduate student at the Iowa College of Engineering.

“They can cause cancer, disrupt hormones, they’re just horrible, and they’re found in the air everywhere,” she says.

To help schools identify and inexpensively remove materials that cause PCBs from their older buildings, Keshei Bannavti is developing a targeted materials-remediation plan as a civil and environmental engineering doctoral student. The research captured first place in the Graduate College’s annual Three Minute Thesis competition earlier this month.

The 3MT competition helps graduate students learn how to articulate their often complex and complicated research to non-experts clearly and concisely in three minutes or less. That isn’t always easy for grad students, most of whom have been taught to go into great depth and speak with a certain language that a non-academic, and sometimes even an academic from another field, may not understand.

The competition, normally held before a live audience in an auditorium, moved online this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. After a preliminary competition with 45 students, 15 finalists recorded their three minutes and uploaded the presentations to YouTube . Judges reviewed the videos, and the winners were announced in a Zoom meeting on Nov. 6. A new traveling trophy was also introduced this year, the Dean’s Cup, which is presented to the college of the winning student.

Keshei Bannavti’s research won the $500 first place prize, as well as a $250 Peoples’ Choice Award, given by students in the AP Research class at City High School. The goal of her research, she says, is to make it easier for school districts, especially those serving underrepresented students and low-income families, to address PCB issues in school buildings built before 1978, when use of the compound was banned.

“This will make PCB removal cheaper, thus more accessible and equitable for all districts,” she says. Removing PCBs is important because the compound accumulates in the blood, so it may not cause health problems until years down the road. She says removing it from schools reduces the likelihood that children will have health problems later by eliminating one source of exposure when they’re young.

But PCB remediation is incredibly expensive, making it a financial challenge for schools to address. A single building can typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to remediate, she says. New York City recently spent more than $1 billion to remediate all of its schools. She says the process often requires massive reconstruction or sometimes building replacement.

“Lower-income schools just don’t have that kind of money,” Bannavti says.

Her materials-remediation research provides a less expensive way to clean a school building’s air by targeting only those materials in a classroom or a building with high levels of PCB. She’s studying how to use robust analytical chemistry methods to compare the PCB signals given off by materials in a classroom to the overall PCB concentration in the entire room. The methods, she says, are so robust, “they can tell us the difference between an elephant and an elephant with a speck of dust on it.”

Experts can then compare the PCB signals from the material from the overall room concentration and see what material contributes most.

“We can take out those specific materials instead of tearing down the entire school,” she says. “This makes it more equitable and accessible for all school districts, making sure more of our kids are healthy.”

Researchers in the 3MT competition say they understand the importance of academics being able to explain their research showing the value of the work they do and why it’s important to a general audience. That means stripping your research down to its bare essentials and avoiding jargon and technical terms that could confuse people outside the field.

“Short, sweet, and to the point,” says Nyema Harmon, a chemistry student in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS).

Competitors say it was a challenge to boil down their research to simple concepts and then present them in such a short time frame. They prepared by practicing with their friends and family members, going over their presentation again and again, reviewing their talking points and practicing their delivery, learning to project their voice and punch up the appropriate words, until it all clocks in at just under the three-minute limit.

“We want them to understand the basic concepts and let them make the connections for themselves,” says Ivy Debrecini, a researcher from the Roy. J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.

The Graduate College also held four online workshops to help researchers identify their key points, develop their PowerPoint slide, and whittle it down to three minutes.

The 3MT competition also gives the competitors a chance to rehearse before they hit the job market.

“In job interviews, I’m asked to give a presentation on my dissertation and I’m ready to do that because I’ve done it here,” says Runqing Qi, from the Second Language Acquisition Program in the CLAS.

Last year’s winner, Christie Vogler, says the experience was key for her success after the competition ended.

“I received a huge confidence boost just knowing I could successfully present my research to any audience, and I gained discipline in the way I approached my dissertation defense and job interviews,” says Vogler, who received her doctorate in classical archaeology from Iowa and is now on the faculty of the Department of History at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia. “To this day, I still find myself reciting the opening line of my 3MT presentation almost like a mantra. It gives me that little boost of confidence to get through what has been a very difficult and hectic year.”

GRAND PRIZE WINNER ($500)

Moala Keshei Bannavti , College of Engineering, who is developing a new method of determining the extent of PCB contamination in school classrooms so it can be more inexpensively mitigated by schools serving low-income and underrepresented students.

HONORABLE MENTION ($250 each)

• Elmira Jangjou , College of Education, for her study of on campus emergency food pantries and their effectiveness in reducing student food insecurity.
• Clarissa Shaw , College of Nursing, for her study of the effectiveness of “elderspeak,” a method health care providers use to communicate with patients who have dementia.

PEOPLES’ CHOICE ($250 each, awarded by students in the AP Research class at City High School)

• Moala Keshei
• Mariam El-Hattab , College of Engineering, for her research that analyzes the use of human fat cells to heal wounds.

Iowa Superfund Research Program

Trainee Wins 3 Minute Thesis Competition

Project 5 trainee David Ramotowski won the University of Iowa 3-Minute Thesis Competition. The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) challenges graduate students to communicate their research in three minutes or less in non-specialist language. Contestants represent a diverse array of disciplines and areas of study and reflect the passion and thirst for discovery common among all of Iowa's graduate students. David’s presentation explained how his research focuses on using bacteria to clean up toxic chemicals in sediments including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). His presentation was entitled “Unlikely Heroes: Keeping Toxic PCBs Out of Our Air With Bacteria and Biochar.”

David is the second ISRP trainee to win the 3-Minute Thesis Competition in the past 4 years. Moala Bannavti won in 2020. Trainee Amanda Bullert was a finalist in 2021 and trainee Nazmin Akter-Eti was a finalist in 2019.

University Libraries - Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

• Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio
• Mission and History
• Platforms and Systems

Consultation and Collaboration

Courses, certificate, and fellowship, resources and services.

• Student Opportunities
• Contact the Studio
• Sign up for the Studio’s Newsletter
• Request a Consultation

The Studio collaborates with students, faculty, and staff on the development, design, and implementation of digital scholarly research projects and publications. Housed in the University of Iowa Libraries, the Studio offers equitable access to space, technology, and digital expertise to shepherd projects from inception to archive.

The Studio's Matthew Butler selected to receive 2023 Benton Award

The Studio’s Senior Developer Matthew Butler has been selected to receive the Arthur Benton University Librarian’s Award for Excellence. Butler has contributed significantly to the continued success and excellence of the Studio and the UI Libraries during his several years of service.

Student Opportunites

 I have been working on my digital archive, you can view it here. HERENCIA MEANS HERITAGE HERENCIA MEANS HERITAGE IS A DIGITAL ARCHIVE THAT SEEKS TO HELP GIVE REPRESENTATION TO MARGINALIZED AND INVISIVILIZED ARTISAN COMMUNITIES AS WELL […]

Hello, My name is Hasan Degerli, a PhD candidate in the Religious Studies Department. I’ve been exploring ideas for a project that merges my field with Digital Humanities, and the Digital Humanities summer fellowship program at the […]

Ever since I was an undergraduate student of Political Science the differences between access to basic amenities like clean drinking water, clean living spaces, health etc concerned me. I decided to work in the development sector to […]

Iran’s political climate has experienced a series of social protests in the past few years. These episodes were caused by different issues and aimed at different ideals and demands which has given rise to the debate if they should be […]

See more Events

College of Law

Three minute thesis workshop: pitching your research.

This session will briefly introduce the  Three Minute Thesis  and allow you to create a summary of your work that can help you beyond 3MT. The skills you will use in a successful 3MT presentation can also be used to win grants, sell ideas, & network professionally.

Register at bit.ly/3MTWorkshops21  and join us for the workshop on Friday, September 10, 2021 from 1:00-3:00 pm in LIB 1022 TILE classroom. 

Graduate College

Articles from august 2024.

UI spearheads $6M multistate NSF grant to help Midwest agricultural communities better manage extreme weather

• August 2024
• February 2024
• January 2024
• December 2023
• November 2023
• October 2023
• September 2023
• August 2023
• February 2023
• December 2022
• November 2022
• October 2022
• September 2022
• February 2022
• January 2022
• December 2021
• November 2021
• October 2021
• September 2021
• August 2021
• January 2021
• December 2020
• November 2020
• October 2020
• September 2020
• January 2020
• December 2019
• November 2019
• October 2019
• September 2019
• August 2019
• February 2018
• October 2017
• August 2017
• September 2014
• September 2012
• January 2011
• December 2010
• November 2009