 Welcome to the 2021 ANU three-minute thesis competition. I'm Anne Evans, the Dean for High Degree Research here at ANU. I acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay my respects to the elders of the Nanual and Nambu people, past and present. I acknowledge their continuing contribution to our city and to our university and welcome any First Nations people joining us this evening. 2021 has been another year of living and researching in a COVID-19 world. Despite this, our community has risen to face these challenges using the skills they are developing as researchers, communication, creativity, flexibility and responsiveness in a time of unprecedented challenge. It is important for us as a research community to tell people about our work and how it can change people's lives and communities and transform society. The three-minute thesis is one way we are developing the skills to do just that. Presenting a thesis in three minutes is hard. I commend all our candidates who participated in this year's competition and our 12 finalists tonight for submitting their three-minute thesis presentations from lockdown. I would now like to wish the best of luck to all our finalists and hand over to our MC for this evening, Professor Inga Muvern. Over to you, Inga. Thanks so much, Anne and welcome everyone. I'm Professor Inga Muvern and I head up the ANU Research Development Team who work hard all year to bring you this event. 2021 has again been an interesting year. Due to COVID restrictions in Canberra, this is the second year in a row that we've hosted the 3MT via Zoom. We're thrilled to have you with us today and you'll be able to enjoy a virtual showcase of our PhD candidate researchers and their projects from the comfort of your home. I hope you are wearing something comfortable. I know I am. The three-minute thesis or 3MT, as we call it, is a research communication competition developed by the University of Queensland. The 3MT has been running for over a decade now. There are 3MT finals like this in over 600 universities in 65 countries worldwide. 2021 has offered us many challenges and today we will meet 12 people doing incredible things with passion and skill and they're all presenting in their own homes to yours. The 3MT challenges PhD candidates to present a compelling aeration on their thesis and its significance to a non-specialist audience. I want to say thanks to all the friends and family joining us tonight. This might be the one and only time you really understand what the PhD candidate in your life is doing. So enjoy. And we want to also thank all the supervisors, research administrators and others here at ANU who make sure our candidates can keep doing their important work in difficult times. We appreciate you. The rules of the competition are simple. Just three minutes for the presenter to tell us what they're researching, how they're doing it and why it matters. No songs, raps, gimmicks, props or magic tricks. One slide, one take, one person, three minutes. We have a distinguished panel of judges to help us decide the winner tonight and I'm very pleased to welcome Professor Keith Nugent who is the ANU Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation. Dr. Ann Martin, the Director of the Tribal Centre at ANU. Chris Steele, MLA, Labor Member for Amaran Viji. Genevieve Jacobs, Journalist and Broadcaster. Dr. Kirk Swarman-Govani, Education Leader and Chair, ACT Multipultural Advisory Council and finally Catherine Carter, Founder of the Think Tank Salon Canberra. We're very grateful to have this amazing all-star panel join us and thank you for being here tonight via Zoom. Viewers, you too will have a chance to vote. When the time is right, we'll pop a poll anywhere link in here and this is your chance to cast your vote for the ANU People's Choice Prize of $1,000. And when you cast your vote, we want you to consider the following things. Did the presentation help you understand the research? Did the person communicate well through voice, gesture and general presence? Did the slide add to the presentation board to distract? And most important, did the presentation make you want to know more? And by this, I like to think about it as the dinner party test, not that we can have dinner parties at the moment, but for when we can. You know that feeling when you've just learned something so interesting and you can't wait to tell someone in your next dinner party about it and you feel confident to do so, that's the sign that our 3MT presenter has really communicated. And now we're trusting you not to share the People's Choice Voting link other than just to fill it in yourself, just to give them a chance to have a fair competition here. This works so hard to prepare and we really try to make it as hard for the judges as possible because they're competing for some very big prizes. The winner of the AMU 3MT in 2021 will get a $4,000 research support grant and a place in the Asia Pacific 3MT final at the University of Queensland in October. The second runner up will get a $2,500 research support grant. Then there's the People's Choice, that's for you, from you, the 1,000 research support grant and there'll be a 500 research support grant given to all the remaining finalists, just to thank them for their time and their effort. The hashtag we're using today on social media is ANU 3MT and it's now time for the show. Audience, are you ready? More importantly, judges, I hope you're ready because it's showtime. First up tonight, we have Lorcan Conlon from the Research School of Physics in the ANU College of Science. And the title of his three minute thesis tonight is Measuring the Future. Try and measure the color of any square on the screen. This is trivial for the larger squares but becomes more difficult as you move down the screen. In order to explain why this is, I want you to think of the light traveling from the screen to your eyes as being made up of many, many tiny bundles of light called photons. When you look at the large white square there are a huge number of photons reaching your eye. And when you look at the large black square very few photons reach your eye, making the two easy to distinguish. As you look at smaller squares there are fewer photons reaching your eye per square making it harder to decide the color of that square. Now imagine taking this to its extreme. We keep making the squares smaller and smaller and smaller until eventually we reach the point where a square is made up of a single atom and things get weird. Measuring on an atomic scale is right at the heart of quantum physics and is critically important for developing future technologies which are rapidly approaching this scale. Unfortunately, measuring at a quantum scale has its own unique challenges. For example, there are roughly a billion trillion photons hitting you right now. And you don't even notice. If these photons were to strike a single atom because the atom is so tiny the atom will move. And so if we try and measure where a single atom is we actually move the atom and so it's not where we think it is. My work focuses on solving these problems. You might have heard about a device called a quantum computer in the news. Now they aren't perfect yet but the first generation of quantum computers are here. I have been given remote access to the world's best quantum computers. I have designed quantum algorithms which can solve the measurement problems we face. From my office here in Canberra I reprogrammed these quantum computers to implement my algorithms. With this, I have been able to make measurements accurate on a scale 10 billion times smaller than a meter the size of a single atom. The improvements that my technique offers may at first appear minor but almost every measurement technique used nowadays was developed in a lab at some stage. It is only a matter of time before my technique is applied across a range of scientific fields. Being able to make more accurate measurements allows archeologists to better date historical objects allows biologists to better probe DNA and allows doctors to better investigate cancerous cells. An atom may seem small but my quantum enhanced measurement technique is the latest step to opening up a whole universe of understanding. Next up we have Kate Oaks from the Research School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. And the title of her three-minute thesis tonight is Meeting Our Paradoxes, Face On. Have you ever read a book that changed your life? Readers will tell you they have. Literature takes ideas and brings them to life in our minds and our hearts. That's what happened to me during my PhD. Let me take you on my research journey. Scholars have recently begun thinking more about animals, about our environmental and ethical impacts on other species. I love animals and I'm fascinated by how we represent them in writing. This led me to an idea called the Meet Paradox. This is the fact that there are some animals we would never harm but some animals it's normal to harm. That we are against animal cruelty but for animal slaughter. The Meet Paradox is something researchers are still trying to figure out. And it's important that we do because it impacts so much of how we treat animals. Considering the Meet Paradox helps us progress towards a more thoughtful world. Our new fiction was well-equipped to explore the paradox in a powerful way. So I looked to a famous author who is known for his depictions of animals. His name is Thomas Hardy. I analyzed his biographies, letters, diaries, notebook entries, his published works and his manuscripts. And I found that Hardy was inconsolable after the death of his pet cat but one of his favorite meals was bacon. I then conducted close readings of over a thousand pages from Hardy's most famous novels. Before my research, Hardy's animals were seen as cryptic and confusing. My analysis was able to show that Hardy's animals dramatized the Meet Paradox. In one scene, a milkmaid releases the swollen udders of a grateful cow and their bodies almost become one. In another, animal organs are thrown about in a game of catch. In one scene, a shepherd risks himself to save his flock. In another, the hero slits a pig's throat and watches it bleed to death. Reading these episodes, I would just sit and cry. I would think about the taste of bacon but then that dying pig. Knowing about the Meet Paradox was one thing but feeling it was another. To understand why Hardy's novels were so moving, I explored the tools they use, like metaphor, illusion and juxtaposition. We know from psychology why these tools work on readers. I was able to broaden our knowledge of Hardy's literary genius. My PhD opens up understandings of how we impact animals and how fiction impacts us. But I didn't just analyze novels. I also wrote my own. Like Hardy, I want to use fiction to pass on the ideas that have moved me. I started my research in Meet Eater. Now I don't think I'll ever eat an animal again. Fiction changed my life and it just might change yours too. Next up is Nua Aziza from the Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs in the ANU College of Asia in the Pacific and the title of her three-minute thesis is Uniting Two Systems. Do you ever wonder where your garbage goes after it leaves your house? What happens to our garbage when the government cannot invest sufficient resources to manage it? Waste management works well here in Australia but in developing countries like Indonesia it's a huge and pressing problems. Indonesia last year purchased more than 67 million tons of waste which mostly ends up in the landfill, creating mountainous waste as you can see here. This is a few in almost all landfills in Indonesia. Can you imagine the smells there? There are also burning garbage fires and waste avalanches. But if you look closely in the pictures there are people and cows. Those people tried to extract the economic potential of waste despite the unsafe and unhealthy conditions. Those are informal waste speakers who collect waste to make a living. My research explores the role of informal waste management that include waste speakers, intermediate waste buyers and other members of the community. I investigated how the system runs and moves into the gap left by the government in the waste collection, transportation and dumping surfaces. I interviewed many actors and analysed government reports, government policies and articles on waste management. From there I learned that the Indonesian government has been trying to innovate this treatment including a massive campaign on reuse, reuse and recycle and bringing in technology to turn waste into energy. But technology tends to put the informal waste system aside. There are also limits to the government's services including in human resources and finance. So keeping the city clean will need informal waste management which has been provided alternatives alongside the government system. All of the system working together and planned and appear chaotic. It brings together two different interests, city cleanliness and economic benefit. My research recognises the failures of informal waste management. With this insight, we can move toward a hybrid system that combines both formal and informal waste management. A design system that empower the informal waste actors, formalises the roles and provides safer and healthier environment for them to work. Under the supervision of the government as the duty pair. So I think the best problem is possible and necessary so that our citizens can enjoy cleaner and livable cities. Thank you. Next we have Alison Hassell from the Research School of Psychology in the ANU College of Health and Medicine. And the title of her three minute thesis tonight is Fostering Kinship Connections. Alex is in out of home care where children are removed from their parents for concerns like abuse and neglect. Alex is just one of 46,000 Australian children who are 16 times more likely to be involved with the youth justice system, up to four times more likely to die by suicide and 35 times as likely to experience homelessness. How did you feel as a child when you first spent time away from a parent like on school camp? For Alex, this separation is not just one week. It is prolonged and traumatic. Most children like Alex, living kinship care with family like a grandparent are in foster care with an unknown caregiver. We know that overall kinship care promotes better wellbeing and a more stable home than foster care but we are uncertain why. Well, what keeps trees ground in the storm? They're roots. When children are placed in care they are ripped from familiar roots. These separations disproportionately harm Indigenous children. However, there is an under-examined hypothesis that kinship care nourishes connections to family, cultural and community roots. This hypothesis could hold the key to why kids in kinship care might do better and is why Australian policy values placement with kinship over foster caregivers. But services can fail to adequately address the challenges kinship family space like intergenerational trauma and complex dynamics. I've spent the past three and a half years examining this hypothesis to design psychological interventions to support all families in care. I first analyzed the caregiver child connection as children thrive in secure relationships. However, this was not enough. Psychologists trained like me can often prioritize caregiver child relationships over other important connections. To promote child wellbeing holistically, I also analyzed broader family, cultural and community roots. I sifted through over two and a half thousand studies to synthesize this literature and I identified 31 key studies. What's more, I met with 100 kinship, foster and biological families. Because these families are often time poor, we met in their homes and parks and slowly built a picture of their lives. Critically, I found connectedness does promote wellbeing for these children and ways we can support families to nourish these connections. My research provides evidence for policies to better support kinship and foster families to keep kids like Alex connected and thriving and not just surviving. Next, we have Angus Ray from the Research School of Biology and the A New College of Science. And the title of Angus' three-minute thesis is Unraveling the Threads of Symbiotic Function. Plants need nitrogen to grow and around 78% of the air is nitrogen gas. But it sucks to be a plant because they can't use nitrogen in its gaseous form and it quickly runs out in the soil. So we use artificial nitrogen fertilizers that not only take a lot of energy to produce but can also cause acid buildup in soils and spoil fresh water by runoff. We need a better source of nitrogen and legumes may hold the key. Beans, peas and other plants in the legume family form a symbiosis, a mutually beneficial relationship with a special bacteria that lives inside their roots and converts the gaseous nitrogen into a usable form. If we can understand how this symbiosis has evolved in legumes and how it works we should be able to make it happen in other plants and reduce our dependency on damaging fertilizers. My research is in how the bacteria enter legume roots, how they infect them in a good way. We know that the plant essentially swallows the bacteria by creating intestine-like tubes that pull them into the root. These microscopic tubes are called infection threads and they're fundamental to this symbiosis but we don't understand how they evolved or how they grow. I've developed methods in advanced microscopy so that I can delve inside cells and look closely at these tiny infection threads. What you're looking at is a unique combination of fluorescent cell wall dyes that I've used to stain infection threads and image them on a specialized light microscope. This beautiful cell is the result. The twisted pink tube inside the cell is an infection thread and now that I've made a tool to study them in detail I've learned how many there are per root and per cell, how long they typically are and where in cells they usually originate. These are weird structures. They twist, they branch and they merge. Though perhaps the most interesting thing that I've discovered is that around 10% of the time they grow backwards and we don't yet know why. There's still so much to learn. The next step is to zoom in even further and work out the molecular signaling pathways that control the growth of infection threads so that we can potentially learn how to make them grow in other plants. This is part of the future of bioengineering our crops so that we can feed ourselves without wrecking the environment at the same time. Next we have Hedda Sway from the Research School of Finance, Actual Studies and Applied Statistics in the Anew College of Business and Economics. And the title of Hedda's three minute thesis tonight is The Glass Cliff. This is a photo of my husband and me when we were kids. No Photoshop. We grew up together, went to the same schools all the way and even had the same outfit. Who do you think had a bigger chance of being a CEO in the future? If you thought it was my husband, you are correct. In 2020, only 5.8% of big company CEOs in the U.S. are female. Those women have broken through the glass ceiling but now seem to be standing on the edge of glass cliff. The glass cliff is where the idea that when the company is in trouble, a female leader is more likely to put in charge. For example, Marisa Mayer became Yahoo's CEO. She inherited the end of the company and faced a mounting pressure to turn it around. We hear stories like this all the time but this research asks, is glass cliff only special case or statistically a patent in CEO's appointments? Using a sample of over 5,000 CEO's appointments of U.S. listed firm over 20 years, my research proved that glass cliff is real, that underperforming companies are more likely to appoint a female CEO's. Then we must ask, why is it happening? We've accessed the two reasons. It might be gender discrimination with women with less opportunities and that consider the only women stay alive. Sometimes that's the only opportunity they have to grab on in order to rise. Alternatively, could it be that women are perceived as a savior? Authorized companies running, crying for money when panic. When times tough, suddenly the women is to write them for the job. I've tested to have this using statistic and econometric analysis and find that our business supported discrimination have a basis. I also find that women are more necessarily a savior. Those end up performing companies that appoint female CEOs do not experience performance improvement. To sum up, when the situation is really bad, people call in the women but it doesn't always help. My research makes us question the common practice of hiring women only to put them on the edge of the last clip. Boys and girls are similar. Like my husband and me, should it have the same opportunities to shine? Next, we've got Anita Gowers from the Centre of Art History and Art Theory at the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences and the title of her three-minute thesis is Putting the Frame Back in the Picture. This is an image of a picture frame. It isn't an Australian frame but I know you've all seen this frame before and I'm confident in guessing very few of you would be able to tell me what artwork this frame belongs to and that makes sense because the role of the frame is to draw your eye to the artwork. It's not to be noticed. And Australian frames face an even greater hurdle of being noticed because our galleries, libraries and museums catalog the artwork but they don't catalog the frame it surrounds and often the artwork and the frame is separated. Consequently, our gallery, libraries and museums have racks and racks full of empty frames that no one knows anything about. In addition, in the early 19th century attitudes to frames were different and artwork couldn't be hung or exhibited without a frame and these frames were made by expert craftsmen but today, often those same frames are discarded because their historical information and value is unknown or unrecorded. My PhD pieces together for the very first time the untold story of Australian frames and their impact on Australian art. To do this, I built a library of over 500 images of frames that I'd collected in 22 galleries, public and private across four states. I've accessed primary source material in libraries and archives in Australia, France, America, England and Ireland and I found the first convicts with the skill of Carver and Gilder listed as their profession. To manage all these data points I implemented a database that allows me to search the relationships between the artist, the frame maker and the artwork. Filling a vital gap in our understanding about the artist frame maker relationship and how the artist wanted their work displayed. This is important information for curators, private collectors and the public in understanding Australian materials. My PhD is important because although the frame may not be noticed, it's embedded with a wealth of information about the artwork that it surrounds. The frame broadens our understanding of Australian design trends. It uncovers an under-acknowledged field of skill and expert craftsmanship and it provides insights into the artist's broad aesthetic vision for their work. Now let's return to our frame. We can see it's a similar surface area to the artwork. It's exquisitely hand carved, typical of the 16th century and it's finished in gold leaf. So from the frame alone we know it surrounds an important artwork. This frame surrounds the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Next we have Nishadi Kiriel from the A New College of Engineering and Computer Science and the title of Nishadi's Three Minute Thesis is Linking Data for a Better Tomorrow. If I tell you I've been to mountains that whisper secrets of the past and the future, what would you imagine? An enchanted forest in a Disney movie? Not really. I'm a data science researcher and these mountains are made up of lots and lots of data. Today we have 7.9 billion people on this earth. That is almost 8 billion birth certificates. If we include our ancestors this is way more than 10 billion and we are adding more every day. Do you know these mountains of data have secrets that could change the lives of people? For instance, there are some cancers that we can inherit from our parents through mutated genes. One in every 10 breast cancer is due to a strong family history. If we can identify such cancers early from their family history we can potentially save lives. I am working on building family trees such as this one here. For instance, to identify people with a family history of cancer. We have databases of birth, marriage and death certificates of our population. My birth certificate has my parents' details. Their birth certificates have their parents' details. Brilliant! We can link them together and build this tree. What? You are doing research just to link a couple of certificates? Just use the medical numbers and link them. I've heard that many times. Unfortunately, in the past no systems such as Medica existed. We are left with the names, addresses and dates of births and deaths. Names are often written differently. They can contain errors and they change over time. The same name can be shared by many people. In my research, I developed machine learning algorithms to solve these challenges and link millions of certificates going back to the 1850s. Instead of checking if two names are exactly the same, I calculated a score to check how similar the name of a baby to the name of a bride on her marriage certificate. In this similarity score, I capture the ambiguity of names, spelling variations in them, the characteristics of the relationships and so on. Using these similarity scores, my algorithms automatically link a baby to a bride then a bride to a mother until the whole population is reconstructed. With that, my goal is to identify that one person among every 10 breast cancer patients much earlier and more accurately than is possible today. Maybe then, the secrets behind the mountains of data will help us save many lives. Thank you. Next, we have Cynthia Turnbull from the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Aynu College of Health and Medicine. And the title of Cynthia's presentation tonight is Shining a Light on Incomplete Penitence. Diabetes, skin rashes, gut pain, and diarrhea. This is what my patient Pablo lives with every day. The cause isn't a virus or a cancer, but his own body. Pablo has a severe form of autoimmunity where his immune cells attack his body. Current treatments are nonspecific, suppressing the entire immune system, causing horrible side effects, and in the end, they can be ineffective. To design better treatments, my lab is looking at the genetic causes of autoimmunity. By reading the 3 billion letters of Pablo's DNA, I found a mutation which stops his Treg cells from working. Tregs are the bounces of your immune system and keep your drunk, overactive immune cells that could hurt your body in line. I thought this mutation could explain Pablo's disease and be a way that we could treat him, but I found something very unexpected. Pablo's mother has the same mutation as him, but miraculously, she is healthy. Her son has been sick since he was a baby, but she's fine. The strange phenomenon where mutations cause disease in some, but not everyone, is called incomplete penetrance, and it's common in many diseases, not just autoimmunity. For example, it can explain why 40% of women with BRCA mutations don't develop breast cancer while others do. As medical scientists, it is our last hurdle in being able to accurately link the treatment of disease with genetics. I believe this protein called dectin-1 could help us overcome it. By isolating the immune cells from the blood of healthy donors, I was able to study dectin-1. When I turned dectin-1 on, it created more Tregs, recruiting more bounces to defend the body. Like the healthy donors, Pavlo's mother has a working dectin-1 that protects her from her mutation. The mutation means her Tregs don't work as well, but dectin-1 makes enough of them to prevent autoimmunity. In Pavlo, dectin-1 is turned off. He's fewer Tregs, which don't work well, and that is why he is so sick. If we could turn dectin-1 back on, his disease would disappear. By studying this beautiful protein, I can explain his disease and have shined a line of incomplete penetrance. We are overcoming that hurdle so that we can protect everybody from damaging mutations and prevent the diseases they cause. Thank you. Next up is Nick Boldovic from the Crawford School of Public Policy in the A.N.U. College of Asia in the Pacific. And the title for Nick's three-minute thesis is, Do You See What I See? I was once having a climate change conversation, and at the time, past Nick was talking about the science and evidence as that's what I thought would convince someone. But it didn't convince them. Where at the beginning, we began the conversation as two people with opposing views. We ended the same way, but now we were even further apart. You see, in Australia, our climate attitudes sometimes sit really far apart and we're second only to the U.S. in how divided we are on climate along political lines. This is a challenging context, especially when climate communication has been recognized as a key element to building social support for climate policy and action. Evidence shows climate conversations can enhance pro-environmental attitudes, so we need to be having them. But how do we have them productively and prevent people further drifting apart in their views? My PhD research sets out to answer this question, but first, let's briefly analyse why past Nick wasn't so effective in his communication. I was focusing on one part of climate change and I honed in on the science and evidence as that's what I saw as important. But what I did unknowingly was construct a communication frame that focused on the science. Just like you see here, climate change can look different depending on what frame you're looking through. One frame might emphasise the public health impacts and the other potential economic benefits. There are plenty of others and they can all be used to communicate about climate, but not all of them are effective. I wanted to find out why and understand how we could use frames to improve communication. So I conducted a huge systematic review. Looking through around 10,000 articles, I created a public database that maps what we do and don't know about climate communication frames. I found that a common way frames are used are as tools of persuasion, where the goal is to simply match the right frame with the right audience and hope it convinces them. We don't know much about how frames operate in conversation. Maybe it's no surprise my prior conversation failed. So I've constructed a new model. Based on the latest theory and evidence as well as in-depth interviews with communicators, it shows how frames can be used to open up and sustain a conversation and that the key to a productive climate conversation is understanding the other person's frame and adjusting your own to keep the conversation going. My goal is to demonstrate how even in Australia where our attitudes have polarised, we can shift to more productive communication and my framing model could help us have better conversations that we need to solve climate change. So next time climate comes up in your conversation, don't be like passing Nick. Think deeply about what frame your words are building and ask yourself, do they see the same frame that I see? Thank you. Next, we have Diana Anderson from the ANU College of Law and the title of Diana's three-minute thesis tonight is, what is law? Australian Indigenous Australians describe their traditional law. They describe a complex system that connects people to country. And yet for 200 years, the entire Australian legal system was based upon the idea that Indigenous Australian peoples had no law at all. It was actually the law that Indigenous Australians had no law, the doctrine of Terranullius. Now, as we all know, Terranullius was finally rejected in the landmark Marbeau decision, nearly 30 years ago now. And since then, Australian law has, at long last, acknowledged that Indigenous law does exist. So I wondered, what was it that changed 30 years ago? Was it that the courts have developed a new appreciation for Indigenous law or own idea of what counts as law become more open? I researched over 200 years of British Australian legal thought, searching for anything I could find on the idea of law. I looked at cases and statutes, the works of legal anthropology and hefty volumes on legal philosophy. I read books and papers, lecture notes and speeches. What I was looking for in all of these documents was how Indigenous Australian law was portrayed and how that compared to the idea of what law is. What I found was that across the centuries, across multiple and diverse schools of thought, all of these theories that I looked at had one striking thing in common. All of them singled out Indigenous Australia as the prime example of what is not law. And that's when it occurred to me. This was never about Indigenous law. This was only ever about the boundaries of what counts as law in the West and as the explicit limit of what counts as law and what doesn't. The denial of law to Indigenous Australia is actually an essential part of the Western concept of law itself, making it practically impossible to conceive of Indigenous law as law. But it doesn't have to be like this. We can rethink the way we lawyers conceptualize law. We can open our minds and our hearts to what Indigenous people say about what law is. Finally, we have Therika Leonhardt from the Research School of Earth Sciences at the AENU College of Science. And the title of her three-minute thesis tonight is My Quest to Make the Invisible Visible. There is a website called soulburners.org where people write their most soul-burning questions on a post-it. Now, imagine my surprise when I found that someone else in the world had the same very specific soul-burning question that I did. Who makes chill and veins? This question is a missing part in our story in the history of life's emergence and evolution. Chill and veins are fossilized biological molecules which are found in almost every rock and oil spanning Earth's long history. Similar to using fossilized bones to reconstruct a skeleton, we can use fossilized molecules to reconstruct ecosystems and the evolution of the first tiny microorganisms. But the problem is we don't know who made chill and veins. And this is wild because there is so much of this molecule in the ground right now. If we added it all up, we would have roughly 500 billion tons. That is the same mass as adding together all the plants, animals, people, insects, and fungi alight on Earth today. That is 500 billion tons of mass right beneath our feet and we don't know where it came from. Scientists have been trying to find the microbial source of chill and veins for decades with no success. However, I found chill and veins in rocks that are billions of years old. To put that in perspective, if we're here, dinosaurs are about here. I found chill and veins over here. This is when it dawned on me that the microbial source of chill and veins must be ancient. But is it possible that they are alive and amongst us today? It was assumed that the microbial source of chill and veins went extinct when scientists looked in the past. However, I am the first to look in the present, to look at modern environments using a new technique that I invented that can make chill and veins visible from complex mixtures of molecules. I searched high in the European Alps and deep beneath the ice in Antarctica and I found them. I found them in both of these places and in many more. There is an organism alive today making chill and veins. They are not extinct and they have persisted through Earth's history for billions of years. This discovery means we need to re-look at everything we know about the early evolution of life and I have so many more soul-burning questions such as how and why are these organisms making chill and veins? I want to meet whoever wrote this post-it because I want to share my discoveries with them and I hope to keep using my research to answer soul-burning questions. Well, what an outstanding showcase of research. I know we've done our job right, preparing the candidates when the judges will find it hard to choose and I think they will. Our judges are now being transported into another room to deliberate. A reminder what's up for grabs tonight in terms of prizes. The winner is getting a $4,000 research support grant and to place in the Asia Pacific 3MT finals at the University of Queensland in October. The second runner-up is getting $2,500 to support their research and the people's choice is getting $1,000. That's the one voted by you. Finally, every other candidate gets $500 research support grant for all their hard work. Now let's see what the audience thinks. We've just opened up the A&U People's Choice Award. You can find it on your screen and the link is pollef.com forward slash A&U RD. We've tweeted the link and if you're following the hashtag A&U 3MT, you can click on it there and select the candidate you want to vote for. The prize is $1,000 and we'll give you just three minutes. As the judges make this difficult decision and as you vote for your favorite 3MT candidate at A&U, let's listen to another talented A&U PhD candidate, Flo and her flatmate Jane. And they are half of the band Lady Denman and they're performing live from their home. Described as a violet crumble queens with a common love of camera and street signs, we're lucky to have them with us. You can find them on Bandcamp. Well, we're half of Lady Denman. I'm Jane and this is Flo. Thankfully, we live with each other so we can put something together like this. Really excited to be playing for you all. This song is called Galaxy. We actually recently released that song, feel free to look it up on Spotify or wherever you listen to music. Excited to be releasing music even though it's a strange time to be doing that. It was really exciting and strange but exciting to be doing this for you all tonight. Yeah, this song is called Girlie. Look at me like... We have some merch coming out soon and a music video coming out soon so keep your eyes peeled if you like what you see here. We'll play this song. Thanks so much for having us. Sash, we're starting in 10 seconds. Please put the slide up Sash now. Share screen. Full screen, Sash, please. Thank you all very much for that fantastic performance tonight. I think you'll all agree with me that Lady Denman are a shining example of the talent coming out of ANU and if you wanna check them out, please check them out on Spotify. So the judges have had time to think. They've deliberated. We've got all of the people's choice votes in and I think that you'll all agree that today's finalists have done an outstanding job and deserve acknowledgement of all their efforts. So please join me to start in giving them all a very big round of applause where you are and on social media using the ANU three minute thesis hashtag. So congratulations all of our finalists tonight. And without further ado, I think the slides need to go back a little but without further ado, I'm going to start to announce the winners. So tonight, the winner of the ANU three minute thesis 2021 People's Choice Award, which is a $1,000 research support grant goes to Nishati Curiel. Great job, Nishati. I think we all really, really enjoyed that presentation. There was a very strong turnout on the voting. So that was fantastic. Thank you very, very much. And on to our other prize winners, we have our runner up, our second place winner tonight. The second place winner gets a $2,500 research support grant. And our runner up tonight is Angus Ray. Congratulations Angus, big claps from everybody. The thing you've all been waiting for, the drum roll, the winner of the ANU three minute thesis for 2021, winning a $4,000 research support grant is Therika Lineage. So congratulations, Therika. It was a fantastic, lots of lawyers, everybody out there in your lounge rooms. So with that, Therika also wins the prize for her supervisor. So the three minute thesis supervisor prize for supporting our winner tonight goes to Yokun Brock. So congratulations, Yokun. Yokun, keep doing a great job supporting your candidates. So we have a final little virtual clap for all of our winners tonight. Thank you for all the participants. So I'd like to move now to our thanks. So many thanks to our very esteemed panel of judges, their pictures, their names are up here. Professor Keith Nugent, Dr. Ann Martin, Chris Steele, MLA, Genevieve Jacobs, Dr. Kirk, Zwangabani, sorry Kirk, and Catherine Carter. Thank you all. It can't have been an easy decision. I'm glad it wasn't me in that Zoom room. And finally, with our thanks, it takes a village to support a PhD candidate and to put on a three minute thesis. I would like to start by thanking the ANU HDR administrators and research supervisors for their dedication to HDR candidates, to their success. And the glow from tonight is sincerely shared with you. I'd also like to thank the partners, families, and cheerleaders of our 3MT finalists. Thank you for your support. Our candidates can't get through the process without the support of their nearest and dearest, so thank you for coming along and helping them out tonight. And finally, our researcher development team, led by Inya Mubin, you're the best dream team to work with. Thank you very much for putting on a virtual in-person, pre-recorded and live event all in the one go. And thank you all out there who've come along to watch. Thank you for coming. Thank you for watching online. Go out there and change your world from inside your own homes. See what you can do in just three minutes. Stay safe and stay positive. And thanks to research from many disciplines. We will all get through this together. Goodbye from the ANU and we look forward to seeing you all again next year.