 This is Carol Monly on Education Matters for Think Tech Hawaii. Today our show is entitled, The Three Minute Thesis Competition, UH 2018 Winners, and I have with me some special guests. First we have two people here in the studio, Dean Christine Aune, who is the head of the graduate division at UH, and Natalia Glebatik, who is a master's student in the department of molecular, biology, biosciences in bioengineering. She was a runner-up this year, and we have long distance from Mexico, from Guadalajara, and Lorencia Duran Delfin, and she is a master's student in the department of communicology. Aloha, Lorencia, can you see us? Can you hear us? Yes? I didn't hear you. Okay, good. All right. So there's Lorencia. So first I want to give our audience a little background about the competition, which I have to disclose that I was invited to be a guest in the final round, and I was very happy to do it, but I knew nothing about this competition until I was invited. So please tell our audience about this really interesting and worldwide three minute thesis competition. Yes. Thank you. Yes, it started in 2008 at the University of Queensland in Australia, and quickly took off nationally and internationally. There's over 600 universities that participate in this event now. On the continent too, there's state and even regional competitions, which eventually we aspire to participate in, but for now this is the second time that we put on the competition, and we love having the opportunity to showcase the amazing work that our graduate students are doing. And so exactly what is the competition about? What are the students competing for, and what are they talking about, and how are they doing this? Great. Well, this is for students either the master's, the doctoral level that have at least secured some research findings. They should be nearing the completion of their graduate degrees, and they have to articulate their research findings in all of three minutes using only one PowerPoint slide without even using animation. So it's really about graduate students translating their research findings to a non-specialist audience in a clear and compelling way. Right. So what I did as part of my research is I Googled it and was amazed to watch these competitors from the years past from all over the world on very interesting topics. Such well-spoken students who articulated in very simple language, right, they're very complex research. Exactly, exactly. And I know the topics vary, right, because it depends. So let's say in Hawaii, what kind of areas I know that you're in, molecular, bio-engineering, and of course, Lorenzia is in communicology. But give us some examples of some of the other areas. Well, that's the beautiful thing about this competition is that we really wanted it to be cross-cutting across. We have fields from art to zoology, and we wanted participants really to cover the array of the different amazing work that's done. And we did have competitors from over 30 different programs. Including the law school, I'm surprised. Exactly. We had law, we had folks from, let's see, biosciences, communicology, that's more of a social science. We had folks in Japsum. Medical school. Medical school, exactly. Right, Hawaiian studies, I think. We did. I think we have two slides. The first one is the notice of the three-minute thesis competition. And if we can put that up just briefly for a second. And then we also have a second slide, which shows the top 10 winners. I mean, the finalist, right? How many competitors did you have for this year's competition? They were over 40. 40. So this is your poster, master's and doctoral students, three-minute thesis. So this year, when was the competition held? It was April 28, Saturday. The one full day. And again, look, $2,000 for the grand prize. And then there was some cash also for the second prize. First $1,000 for the runner-up. Wonderful. And can we go to the next image? And can you tell our audience what this one is? So these are the 10 finalists. Institute for Astronomy, I see. Communications, engineering. Let's see, law. Is it computer engineering? I forget now. And there's Natalia and our Hawaiian studies finalist. So yes, we had a broad array of disciplines represented in the final. In the final 10. Out of a total of, you said, over 40. Over 40, yeah. Right. And last year, how many competitors did you have? About the same. About the same, yeah. And is there a maximum number of students who can participate? Well, we capped it at about 90. But it was held in 2016. So we skipped a year. And we helped to make it an annual event, moving forward. I see. And so about how long does it take to prepare? So Natalia, how long did it take you to prepare once you decided to apply and enter the competition? I would say it took me about a week. Well, let's say two weeks, because the first week I had to come up with what I was going to say, write it, talk with it with my mentor, Dr. Michelle Madder. And then I had to practice for a week nonstop. Right. So it was a lot of practice over and over again in front of a mirror, in front of people, and for family, friends. Well, it was successful. It takes a lot of practice. Yeah, it took about two weeks' solid work. Right. Now, let's see if we can get Florencia over the phone. Florencia, can you see us and hear us? Hi. I can hear you, yes. So Florencia Duran Delfine is in the Department of Communicology. And she was. You were the winner this year, the first place. And you were also the people's choice. So tell us a little bit about your talk. And we have an image of your particular. You could give us the title of your talk. And we have an image that you projected. You were only allowed to, each competitor was only allowed to project one image on the screen, right? And why is that? I'm going to ask you. That's part of the trademarked three-minute thesis competition. And we're official users of the three-minute thesis trademarked competition. It really is about making the communication of the research findings the priority and what is being judged. And not anything flashy about what's on a screen. Right, no moving parts, no live demonstrations. Exactly, yeah. So Florencia, tell us a little bit about your particular winning paper, speech. It wasn't a paper. It was based on a paper. The speech. Yes. OK, well, just like Natalia, it took me about two weeks to prep. And the University of Hawaii offered a workshop on how to tell your thesis in three minutes. And I think that workshop was really helpful. They basically told you, for your introduction, you need about 50 words. And then for the next section, 50, yes. And then for the next section, the rationale, you will use about 70 words. And you need to explain why you expect to find what you found. So I'm not going to go all over the explanation, but they basically told you more or less how many words you need per section. And I found that very, very useful. So the title of your winning paper speech was the influence of environment exposure on women's negative emotion expression. Is that correct? That is correct. That's a mouthful. Let's show to our audience the image that Florencia projected to the audience. Do we have that? Yes. OK. Can you see that, Florencia? I cannot, but I remember the image. OK. So why don't you tell us very briefly in about 30 seconds or 45 seconds that your general thesis and go for it. So we wanted to know if women are more expressive after being exposed to nature rather than being exposed to a city environment. I see. So I look at your image, and I'm going to describe it for our podcast listeners, is divided into two. And so one shows a conversation between a woman and someone at a computer. But there is a car with a background. I guess that's kind of like a description of the background. Versus a second image with the woman and a conversation or a dialogue with somebody at a computer. And in the background is a tree. So the two different environments, right? One with noise, the car, and one with the tree. Is that a good description of what I'm looking at? Yes. Graphic design is not my strongest side. But what I wanted to communicate with that slide was the experiment that we conducted. It was difficult for us to take women outside to a live forest or a live city. So what we did is that we brought 90 women to a laboratory. And we showed them either a video of nature. And when I say nature, I mean forest, waterfalls, so on and so forth. Or we showed them a video of a city. So for example, buildings, traffic, shopping malls. And then what we did is that we asked them to write about a painful experience that happened to them recently. And we asked them to explore their emotions in their writing. And then we compared the writings according to the condition. And the result was the differences? There was a difference in the way they told the stories. The women that watched the nature video were significantly more expressive. So they wrote more negative emotions, more words that expressed some negative emotions, more words that expressed anger, sadness, and anxiety. And they were also less likely to express anger. That is, to write zero words of anger even though they felt anger. But what happened with the women that watched the city video is that they were four times more likely to not write any word that expressed anger, although they felt anger. How do you know they felt anger? How do you know they felt anger? Because right after watching the video, we asked them to assess their emotions. So right now, how do you feel? Do you feel aggressive? Do you feel angry? Do you feel sad? And actually, the women that watched the city video reported feeling significantly angrier than the women that watched the nature video. So what is our conclusion based on your research then? Well, when you communicate negative emotions, it depends on several things. It depends on your culture, social norms, a lot of things. But what I think is interesting about this research is that we have evidence that the surroundings also affect how expressive you are and whether you are open enough to communicate negative emotions or not. Well, your thesis, your three-minute speech, was so successful not only did it win first place among the judges. Congratulations. But it also won the People's Choice Award. And so tell us, Christina, how is the People's Choice Award decided by? That's purely the audience members, apart from the judges that were selected to serve as the finals-round judges. And in fact, as you recall, you're whisked away to another room while the audience members complete the ballot. And interestingly, that's the second time that the first place winner also won the People's Choice, which indicates either some form of reliability of the evaluation or it is interesting that this has happened twice now at UH Manoa. Right, great. Well, thank you so much, Florencia. With that, we're going to go to a short break. And we'll be right back with my guests from here in Hawaii, Christina and Natalia and Florencia, who's in Guadalajara, Mexico. We'll be right back. Just walking by, and all these DJs and producers are set up all around the city. At this is Karaman Lee on Education Matters for Tink-Tek, Hawaii. And this is our show on the three-minute thesis competition with my guest, Dean Christina Aune from the University of Hawaii's Graduate Division. And our two students, Natalia LeBactic, from the Department of Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering. Yes, Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering. And Florencia Doran Delfin, who is in Guadalajara, Mexico, who is on our screen. And she spoke to us about her winning project. And she's from the Department of Community Apology. So you won the runner-up prize. Congratulations. Thank you. So tell us the title of your paper. I don't want to mess it up. No, your thesis, your speech. Well, the title of my three-minute thesis was Going with the Flow to Stop Sepsis. Well, going with the flow to stop sepsis. And it's based on your research, which is called? Well, it's basically finding a way to stop lethal leakage in blood vessels that is caused by sepsis. I see. So you're in the middle of your masters. Are you writing your thesis, or is it completed? Close. It's not completed yet. I'm still doing some work, yeah. So how far along are you on your thesis? This is my second year in masters. So the project is basically finishing up. OK, so you've finished your research during the final stages of writing. And then you get this opportunity to summarize and condense it and articulate it in three minutes or less. Well, this was practiced for me before I write the thesis. Yeah, very good. OK, so I can see. So it works beforehand as a way of helping you synthesize. Yes, the entire. OK, so tell us again the title. And we have a slide. We have an image of Natalia's winning three-minute thesis. Can we show that image? Yes, yes, here it is. So can you describe that for our audience? Yes, sure. So the title is Going with the Flow to Stop Sepsis. So it's basically showing a healthy blood vessel. And then in sepsis, that healthy blood vessel dysfunctions leading to leakiness in the blood vessel, so fluids and nutrients in the blood. And we're basically finding a way to stop it, so there's a big stop around the sepsis. I see. So in sepsis, one of the most dangerous parts in what causes sepsis to move from sepsis to severe sepsis, in septic shock, which kills a lot. So sepsis was defined for our audience. Yes, OK. So sepsis is the body's extreme reaction to a bacterial infection that has entered the blood stream. OK. And so it's very devastating. It's the leading cause of death in US hospitals. It is? It is, yes. So it's caused by? It's caused by a bacterial infection. So it usually happens to people who are immunocompromised, who have just had surgery, who are exposed to some pathogen. Any kind of surgery that can be the hospital for a wound or surgery? Yes, they can get cut. Like I was saying in my three-minute speech, you can have a child playing baseball, get cut, and then a bacterial infection might get to a point where it reaches sepsis. So it could affect anyone, but mostly people who are immunocompromised. Right. And so sepsis, if caught really early, could be treated with fluids and antibiotics. But the mortality risk is still high. It's up to 30%. And then as it moves on to severe sepsis and septic shock, the mortality rates rise up to 60%, 70%. That's really devastating, that's a large percentage. And so one of the ways sepsis moves on to the more severe form is through blood vessel dysfunction. And so the blood vessel dysfunctions, we get leakiness. And we still don't know how these blood vessels and these cells that act as those gatekeepers function and how we, and we were looking for a way if we can find how they're regulated, if there's a way to block that leakiness from happening and stop this movement from sepsis to severe sepsis and septic shock. I see. So in your three-minute speech then, what was your bottom line? What were you telling our audience? My bottom line was that in our lab, we actually found a protein that seems to be very important in regulating this switch from a healthy vessel to an unhealthy leaky vessel. And we might have found a potential target for developing therapies for sepsis. And it's really important because there are other diseases that are really affected by vascular leakage, such as cancer and diabetes and atherosclerosis. And it's particularly important for Hawaii because here actually native Hawaiians have a two-fold increased risk of death from sepsis and cancer-associated sepsis. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, so we're really excited about finding it and we're really excited to move into animal models and pre-clinical trials. So your next step now is we've finished with the three-minute competition. You were runner-up. And you're going into your third year? Well, yes. I am most likely gonna go on with a PhD and stay in the same field. So I'd like to move the project forward. Stay here in Hawaii and do that. So exciting. Yes, very exciting. Yeah, so Christina, you, as the head of graduate division, you get the opportunity to supervise all these students. How does that work? Indirectly. It's really the hard work of the mentors, the advisors, and in some cases the PIs who fund some of these research projects, et cetera. And the graduate chairs of the different academic units, we work very more directly and closely with. But a lot of it is somewhat decentralized, but we take great pride in the amazing accomplishments of our graduate students across the board. And how does this competition, do you think, move forward in terms of helping them develop whatever skillset they need to be successful? Yeah, this whole notion of science communication is really critical. A lot of amazing work is done across the board, as we've discussed and have seen. But the ability to translate that research into the meaningfulness of it is sometimes not necessarily directly trained in the academic programs themselves. And that's a place where we can support that really important skillset to be developed centrally. With the workshops that Florence here was talking about, Dr. Hubbard, the chair of the Department of Communicology, put that on. And it was really hands-on. I think it really facilitated a lot of students really understanding how to best translate their work to a non-specialized audience. Often graduate students and the faculty are talking with each other. And they understand the language that they're communicating. But the trick is really to be able to translate it to others and the public, to the public. People like me who can't even say the name of your department. Tripping over the name. Right. Well, that's really so important. And as we know, as patients, we know our doctors who might be extremely skilled in whatever specialty they have. But if they can't communicate it to us, it's not helpful. And the same with lawyers. If they can't explain it to a jury of late people, then they're not going to be able to win their case. So what's the next step then with the competition? I know that this is the second year. It is. And it does take a village. We had a wonderful planning committee to help put that on. We had many people. And many volunteers. And the faculty members who judged the preliminary rounds were really very grateful. Because it does take a lot of folks to put it on. And we'll be in planning mode. We already had a debriefing session. And we'll be in planning mode for next year's competition to continue the trend and even make it better. The Vice Chancellor for Research, who's also serving as the Interim Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, has also offered to fund our winner, perhaps, to move on to a regional or probably West Coast competition for the next step. So he already committed to that after I described he was out of town and couldn't make this year's competition. I hope so. We hope to really, it's one thing to do this and have our own students develop their skills. And we can show the community, our faculty, our administration, our regents, who are also part of the VIP judge, exactly what, again, the amazing work that is done. Our graduate students are doing it. But we want to perhaps take it to the next step and send our students to national or even international competitions, perhaps, if they're. So tell me a little bit more about that. Because in law, we have court competitions, which has many different levels. So there are regional and then national and then maybe international competitions. Exactly. We'll start probably with the next step and probably the regional. So the first, the winner, and maybe the second, the runner up, we'll be able to go. Yeah, we hope so. We hope so. You will represent us well. Exactly. OK, and then, so we've never done that before. We have not yet done that. I see. And in terms, you said there were 600 universities across the world now. Yes, and 65 countries. In 65 countries. In 65 countries. Remarkable. Right. Now, are we the only ones in Hawaii doing it? Yes, we are. We are of Hawaii. We are. And how's the funding? Where do you get the funding? Oh, for the scholarship money. It is scholarship funds that we use for the award. The award, but all the rest of the time is part of your regular budget. Part of our budget, in terms of, right. And the students get a lot of. So do you work with other students when you develop your own speech? Yes. How does that work? So are the CTAR. So I'm part of the Department of Molecular Bioscience and Bioengineering, as part of CTAR. And we actually have all these. CTAR stands for? College of Tropical, Agriculture, and Human Resources. Right. And we actually have a three-minute elevator pitch competition that's based on the three-minute thesis. And I participated in that and a lot of other students. And then I participated in this one. That sounds like fun. The three-minute elevator competition. Yeah, it's basically the same rules. It's basically the same rules. But that's unofficial. It's not part of an international or a national. No, no. That's part of CTAR. Exactly. Yeah, just for us. And is it the same thing you're going to say in three minutes, you're talking about your particular thesis? Yes, yes. And so a lot of students participated in that. And then the top students moved on to the whole graduate division. And this is our hope, actually, is to have the different schools and colleges might host their own internal competition and have those winners then funnel into the campus wide event that we put on in spring of each year. So we're hoping to move in that direction. Well, it really makes so much sense to develop that additional skill in addition to the intense research and scientific background you must have and your ability to write well is to be able to communicate it morally to blade people like us. So thank you. Well, we just have a few more minutes left. And Lorencia, are you still with us? Yes. Hi. So from Guadalajara, what else would you like to tell us about the competition? Was there anything in particular that you received as a benefit from, of course, you won. And you were going to receive $2,000. But in terms of developing any skills or enhancing your interest in speech making? Yeah. Well, I studied communication. So I've always been interested in speech. But something that I was often about this contest was it was just fun. It was fun coming up with the draft and then reading it once in a while and editing things. And then what I did, I recorded myself. And then I sent my speech to some Mexican friends because I thought if my Mexican friends understand, it is more likely that an American audience will understand. And then implementing their feedback into the speech. Like I had friends who told me that it's good, but I'm getting bored. So I did stuff with your voice. So I love that feedback. It was just very fun. Good. Well, thank you. That was a nice summary of it. And Natalia? I'd just like to give advice for any other graduate students who are thinking of maybe doing it. It's an amazing opportunity to really learn how to communicate your science, which is the point. And I actually catch myself all the time now using sentences that I prepared for that when I talk to other people. Or I use that my three-minute speech to explain my research to any other people that I might be talking about my research to. And I really encourage anyone because it helps a lot. And I mean, those three minutes of speech actually develop a whole way of me speaking about my research now that I didn't have before. So I recommend for any other graduate students who are thinking about doing it to really do it next year. It's worth it. Great. Well, now I'm going to give you the last 15 seconds to look into camera for and tell our viewers about what you would like to leave us with. Oh, gosh. Well, we hope that everyone loves our graduate students as much as we do. And if anyone wishes to support or witness the next year's competition, we welcome public and family and friends were invited. And we did have some space in the auditorium where we held the final round. So if anyone's interested in learning more information, please look at our website. I think it'll be posted, manoa.hawaii.edu forward slash graduate. So we'd love to get more support. We're always looking for ways to spotlight graduate education. It's so critical to a research university. And I think you can see how much graduate students contribute to the research mission of the university and how important it is for us to support their efforts. Right. OK. Well, on that note, I'm going to thank our guests who shared with us today some very important information about the three-minute thesis competition at the University of Hawaii, what important things our university is doing for our community and our students. Thank you, Dean Christina Anne and Natalia Lubeptic and Florencia Duran Delphine in Guadalajara. So this is Tara Monli on Think Tech Hawaii at Education Matters. Thank you again, and we'll see you next time. Aloha.