The annual School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences/Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences Three Minute Thesis competition was held on Wednesday 2nd July 2025 in the Dutton Park Campus auditorium.
This year’s competition featured 12 QAEHS HDR students, each presenting their research to an engaged audience. The presenters included Reena Que, Simran Kaur, Dhaya Nadarajan, Zeyang Zhao, Jianan Ren, Pooja Lakhey, Honglin Chen, Lily Pan, Yuya Cheng, Marina Suzuki, Tobias Hulleman and Ruvini Weerasinghe.
The winners of this year’s competition were:
- Tobias Hulleman, who took both First Prize and People’s Choice for his presentation “Fast and suspicious: Predicting environmental mobility using machine learning”.
- Simran Kaur, who was Runner Up for her presentation “Who let the crumbs out?”.
Tobias Hulleman will now advance to the Health, Medicine and Behavioural Sciences Faculty Final on the 16th of July, which will be hosted at the Dutton Park Campus.
Tobias, a first-time participant, noted that “fitting your PhD thesis into a 3-minute talk, especially one that anyone can understand, is much harder than I first thought. It really pushes you to find creative and fun ways to communicate and greatly helped me develop my public speaking skills.”
QAEHS Director, Prof Kevin Thomas, expressed his appreciation for all the participants, stating, “Every student delivered an outstanding 3-minute presentation, making it a tough decision for the judges to choose a winner due to the consistently high quality.”
Reena Que commented that “it is an honour to have the general audience give you 3 minutes of their lives to listen to what you do. Therefore, you have to make sure that you take that 3-minute chance to be impactful when sharing the significance of your work."
Ruvini Weerasinghe, also a first-time participant, reported that “it was my first 3MT here. I only had the chance to watch 3MT before and never thought of participating myself. I would like to thank QAEHS for the opportunity. I really appreciated the help given by fellow students and supervisors on writing the script. We had a couple of winners from last year and they shared their experience during the practice sessions. It was a wonderful experience that helped me to test my writing and public speaking.”
The 3MT® is an academic competition that challenges PhD students to describe their research within three minutes to a general audience. 3MT® celebrates the discoveries made by research students and encourages their skill in communicating the importance of research to the broader community.
