The eight finalists who will compete in The University of Queensland’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT™) Final are set after Wilko Duprez from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience won the last-chance Wildcard round on Thursday.
Mr Duprez’s presentation, ‘Making drugs, not war: the hippie medication’, was judged the best of an impressive field and will now join the seven faculty and combined institute winners who will compete for the UQ title on Tuesday 18 September 2012.
First developed by the UQ Graduate School in 2008, 3MT challenges research higher degree students to communicate the significance of their projects to a non-specialist audience in just three minutes.
The winner of the 3MT UQ Final will be awarded a $5,000 travel grant and the right to represent UQ at the prestigious Trans-Tasman final on 11 October 2012; an event that will attract competitors from more than 40 universities across Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the South Pacific.
Mr Duprez, a third-year PhD student from France whose study focuses on designing new medicines, said he was delighted the hard work he put into his presentation had paid dividends.
“I spent a lot of time trying to make it interesting and dynamic,” Mr Duprez said.
“Anyone can come up with a good speech, but to make it dynamic and hook the audience, you have to really think about things like including catchy sentences.
“I spent a lot of time reading my speech out loud while asking myself ‘Would I be interested to listen to this?’”
The final eight competitors will try to emulate the achievements of University of Queensland PhD student and Fulbright Scholar Matthew Thompson who, in addition to winning the UQ 3MT title in 2011, was also victorious in the Trans-Tasman competition.
The eight competitors for the 3MT UQ Final are:
- Nahyun Kwon (Faculty of Arts)
- Ali Habibi (Faculty of Engineering, Architecture & Information Technology)
- Kathryn Plonka (Faculty of Health Sciences)
- Catherine Tiplady (Faculty of Science)
- Wen Wu (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences)
- Amanda Pearce (Australian Institute for Bioengineering & Nanotechnology)
- Kerstin Braun (Faculty of Business, Economics and Law)
- Wilko Duprez (Institute for Molecular Bioscience)
For more information about 3MT, please click here.
Further information: Mark Schroder, UQ Graduate School Marketing & Communications, Tel: 3346 0509 or m.schroder@uq.edu.au.
