3MT 2019 Awards

Graduate students competed in the College of Graduate Studies Three-minute Thesis presentations on February 21, 2019.  The annual program, originally developed by University of Queensland, serves to sharpen graduate students' presentation skills and build the attention of diverse audiences to give better exposure to their research. The 2019 3MT presenters included:

Derek Wolf, Mechanical Engineering doctoral student, earned the College of Graduate Studies Excellence Award for his presentation entitled Achieving Reaching Motions with a Functional Electrical Stimulation-Controlled Arm.  Wolf is pictured at right while taking part in a vidoetaping opportunity for the presenters, courtesy of the Center for Institutional Technology & Distance Learning.

Nikkhil Velingkaar earned the College of Graduate Studies Outstanding Award. As such, the Regulatory Biology doctoral student qualified for the Midwest Association of Graduate Schools on March 20-22.  The regional 3MT Competition was held during the 2019 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, where Velingkaar competed with peers from more than 60 colleges and universities. 

Velingkaar described his experience:
Participating in the 3MT competition was a valuable and memorable experience and representing CSU at the Mid-West level was a proud moment for me. It was inspiring to meet participants from other universities and hear them share their passion for research. Being a graduate student from the Department of Biology, we get opportunities to present our research work at conferences wherein we are able to connect ourselves with a science-based audience and are not afraid to use scientific jargon. The 3MT competition presents us with a unique challenge to not only summarize our research in 3 minutes, but also use relatively simple terms and explain the significance of our work to a non-specialist audience. We get to learn a lot from this competition and it helps us improve our public speaking skills. I would like to thank my Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Roman Kondratov, Center for Gene Regulation in Health and Disease, for encouragement and support in this competition. I definitely recommend every graduate student to participate in 3MT and learn to be effective and have fun while presenting.

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