 Good afternoon, and welcome to this three-minute thesis competition here at Aarhus University. The three-minute thesis competition was founded at the University of Queensland in Australia in 2008, and today there are three-minute thesis competitions at more than 600 universities worldwide. This year we've done it slightly different. We had an open call where people could apply with expressions of interest, and we had 34 PhD students applying, and 20 were selected, and tonight you'll see 17 of them. We have one fell ill, one had to go traveling, and one had a son who fell ill, so that's what happens, but tonight you'll see 17 of them. A month or so ago they went through a workshop where they learned a little about how to structure a presentation like this, how to work with their body language and their voice, and then a month ago or so they had the possibility to do a rehearsal in groups of four, where they also got a little feedback on their presentations, and having followed them from the very beginning, I can tell you that you're in for a real treat today. No matter who wins, they have all gotten some really good tools to work with in their future careers, both when it comes to body language, voice, how to do a presentation in general, that they can use both in when teaching, presenting at conferences, or when trying to persuade their colleagues at meetings, and so no matter who wins today, they will all bring something forward. Today's program looks like this after this short introduction. I'll also go through the rules for the presentations and the criteria for our judges. We'll come to them as well in just a second. Then we'll do the first eight presentations due to the last minute cancellation, and then we have a small break. Then we'll have the final line, and then the jury will go deliberate on the winner, and we will work on the People's Choice Award. I'll get back to that in just a second as well. Then we have the winner of the three minute thesis competition here, and that will be the end of it in about two, two and a half hours. Here you can see all the contestants today in the order of presentation, starting with and Katrina in just a couple of minutes, and we have tried to mix them up a little, so you will have very different presentations. We have representatives from all four faculties from the university, and you'll be going through a wide range of research projects. The rules. Everybody is allowed to have one single static PowerPoint slide, no animations or just the one single slide. There will be a short slide presenting people when they get on stage and when they start talking, their own homemade slide will be behind them. No additional electronic media, so no music or video or anything. No props are permitted, and then you are of course limited to the three minutes hence the name, and you'll have a clock running over there. When there are 10 seconds left, you'll hear a not so discreet cough by the loudspeaker over there, and not so discreet ringing sound when the three minutes are up. Presentations are to be spoken word, so no poems, raps or songs are singing today. Presentations are to commence from the stage, which means that they will have the opportunity to get on stage, just have a breath, and when they start speaking, we'll start the time. And then the decision of the jury is final. And again, having followed them, I'm glad I'm here and not there. I think it's going to be a tough one. If you could have the jury members, if you could just stand up and wait so they can see you. It's Suss Vestergaard, who is a team leader from the Rector's Office of Communication and Press, then is Associate Professor Deleuze Escoble Wilson, and then a PhD student and President of the AU PhD Association, Victoria, who will be the judges tonight. And yes, and we hope that you are better at making decisions than the English Parliament is at the moment. This is the sheet where they will judge from the judging criteria. So you can see it's both a question of comprehension and content and engagement and communication, which is why they had both the parts at the workshop. I think you all have a small sheet on your chairs as well where you can make a few notes, even if you don't have the whole presentation or the whole sheet here for each one of them. So, and that will come in handy when we'll be talking about the People's Choice Award. When the judges go deliberate, in that break I'll find three, five people here from the audience and we will try and work out a group of the three best. And then we will, after the break, have a short show of hands here. I'll have my very own break of moment here, trying to, like in the British Parliament, order and see if we can have our own decision here on who will win the People's Choice Award. Then, this will come on stage and present the winner on the jury. The winner of the main prize will win a travel grant for 35,000 Danish Kroners and then he or she enters into the Coimbra three-minute thesis competition selection. Coimbra is a network of international network of universities that Aarhus University is part of and so they have made a competition within this network. And there will be a jury on all universities selecting the best videos. It will be the video from tonight, this afternoon. And then the three best will be invited to present at the Coimbra General Assembly in Krakow in June 2019. And with that, I think we're pretty much ready to begin. So, again, welcome. I hope we have a nice couple of hours and before we begin let's give a big hand to our brave contestants. Let me tell you a short story. An elderly man is lying in a hospital bed in pain and a nurse enters the room with a friendly smile. The nurse asks, how are you today? And the elderly man replies, you don't care, get out of here, stupid. Not really a polite response, right? But what if I tell you that the nurse isn't actually a human being but a robot made to care for the elderly? Now perhaps you feel your perspective shifting, but why? My project seeks to explore what it takes for us to see a human, what it takes for us to see something as a someone. We appear to be equipped by evolution with a very strong sensitivity towards any sign of a human-like social being. In fact, these sensitivities are so strong that they can even be characterized as a kind of evolutionary button for sociality. Robots are designed to push these buttons and when they do, it is exceedingly difficult for us not to feel that this something is actually a someone. Even robot engineers cannot help but feel emotionally pulled in towards their own socially responsive creations. And if people are told to inflict pain on a cute little robot toy dinosaur that screams and wriggles in protest, they cringe. They're highly emotionally affected and even distressed by this, even though some part of them knows that these displays of pain aren't real. But the point is that they feel real. My project seeks to integrate different lines of research into combined theory about what it is that turns something into someone. It may allow us to create robots that do not generate the kind of resistance we saw in the elderly men, but do we want to? The creation of robots that push our social buttons raises a range of ethical questions because even if they can copy all the appearances of caring behavior, it doesn't change the fact that they don't care. But perhaps even more worryingly, if the displays of behavior are satisfactory and fulfilling, does it even matter to us that they're only an appearance? In any case, knowing how something pushes these buttons of ours gives us the power of choice. So now imagine yourself back in the hospital bed as an elderly person. What do you want? We don't want fake news, but do you want fake care? Thank you, Anna Katrina. And next up is Kamina. Plants are constantly saving each other's lives. Whenever you step out on a field, you're actually stepping on thousands of biological phone lines that are connecting plants to each other. Through these phone lines, these plants exchange water, nutrients, and they text like hell worse than teenagers. Well, these biological phone lines, they're actually fungi that live in symbiosis with these plants and they facilitate this kind of communication. But why? Well, plants, they can't move, they cannot run away from danger. So they need to find ways to warn each other, to say, hey, mate, be ready. Something's coming your way and something's about to rage. When I started this PhD, I wanted to know why and I wanted to know how. So how do these plants do this? And to do that, I made one plant very sad. I attacked it and it started sending messages across its network and saying to the other ones, I'm being attacked. You should also prepare because it is coming. So I tried to measure what was happening in one plant, what was happening underground, and what's happening on the other plant and which language are they actually speaking? I could not really find out yet, but it seems like it is a matter of perception. Much like humans, when we're stressed, other people can understand that we are stressed. So it seems like one plant gets stressed. These biological phone lines, in turn, sensing this plant's stress, also get stressed. And the microbes around them in the soil also get stressed. And all of this is perceived by the connecting or neighboring plant which says, oh damn, what am I going to do? How am I going to act? This is also super cool, if you're me. But so what? What can we do as a society? How can we benefit from it? Well, if we can understand how plants do this and how plants get this network and this signaling and this talk going, we can harvest it. We can use it. Because if plants are actually saving each other's lives, we may not really need to do it ourselves. And we still need to feed the world by 2050, right? So these life-saving plants, who are preparing for war, they can just save themselves. And we can rest assured that we might not even have to worry about it. And feeding ourselves is a given. Thank you, Kamina. And then it's Jakob. When a blood clot formed in the legs dislodges, it travels up via the veins through the heart and into the lungs where it gets stuck. This obstruction forces the heart to work harder in order to pump blood through the lungs. If the obstruction is too great, the heart fails and the patient dies. This is a dangerous and common disease and causing more than half a million death a year in the EU alone. Despite this, treatments have remained largely unchanged for decades and still focus on removing the blood clot. As it turns out, however, the mechanical obstruction of this blood clot is only part of the problem. As agents released from this blood clot constricts pulmonary arteries and hereby worsens the overall obstruction. The question is then, can we reverse this visual constriction and prevent the heart from failing? Viagra is a well-known dilator of vessels, most commonly used to increase the blood flow to the male genitals. This effect may also be present in the lungs. And that is why we aim to investigate if treatment with Viagra reduces the obstruction of the lungs and improves the function of the heart in pigs suffering from blood clots in the lungs. And we use the pigs in this experiment as the cardiovascular anatomy and size resembles that of humans. We draw blood and let it coagulate in plastic tubes. This allows us to create blood clots similar to what we find in patients. Two of those were injected in a large vein on the neck from where the blood flow carried it to the lungs. Then animals were randomized to receive either placebo or Viagra. The obstruction of the lung was evaluated by catheters and the function of the heart by ultrasound. And what do we find? Well after injecting these two blood clots the obstruction increased greatly in the lungs and when looking with the ultrasound we saw that the heart was struggling. Placebo didn't improve this but in animals treated with Viagra we saw a clear reduction in the obstruction of the lungs and when looking at the ultrasound we saw that the function of the heart had improved. So to conclude treatment with Viagra reduces the obstruction of the lungs and improves the function of the heart and picks suffering from blood clots in the lungs. And in the future this simple and inexpensive treatment may prevent failure of the heart and improve survival of patient suffering from this common and dangerous disease. Thank you. Thank you Jakob. And next up is Jeppe. Did you know that we can solve the entire world's energy demand by covering an area of 350,000 square kilometers with solar panels? You might not have a feeling about how large an area this is but they are actually less than 0.1 percent of the surface of earth and it compares to our neighbor countries Sweden, Germany, even Norway. Maybe we should take a vote about which country we can spare joking aside. In my research group we aim to minimize this area by enhancing the efficient of silicon-based solar cells. To understand how this works we need to have a basic understanding of energy conversion in a solar cell. So as many of you might know the light or the sun emits in many colors what we in physics denote as wavelengths and only some of these wavelengths can be absorbed in silicon. In the graph behind me I've shown the solar spectrum. In green you see the part that can be absorbed in silicon and in red the part that cannot be absorbed. This red part amounts to 20 percent of the light from the sun. So there's a lot of energy here that we can harvest. In my research group we aim to do this by process called up conversion. Up conversion is the process of combining two photons, light particles, to one of higher energy and we can do this in the element erbium since erbium has the ability to absorb two photons at 1500 nanometers and emit one at 980 nanometer. That's actually a coincidence with the most efficient region from a silicon-based solar cell. Unfortunately this process is very inefficient since erbium is a poor absorber but luckily we can enhance the process by focusing the light since the process involves the absorption of two photons at once. And then instead of placing a large lens in front of the up converting sample we structure the surface with a metal nanostructures and if these are shaped correctly for the incoming light they can interact and create a resonance phenomenon that greatly enhances the light in this up converting sample and hereby enhances the up conversion in erbium. Recently in my research group we have been able to measure a world record baking 850 fold enhancement of the up conversion process and hopefully in the future we will be able to see high efficient solar cells with this technique incorporated. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And next up is Kaspar. I've always been fascinated by Formula 1 pit crews. They can stop a car, lift a car, take off four wheels, put back on four new wheels, pump it with gas, set it down and let it go in just two seconds. I'm not studying Formula 1 pit crews though. I'm a physician studying how we can improve the resuscitation from cardiac arrest in hospitals because each year more than 3,000 people suffer from a cardiac arrest in Danish hospitals and only one in three will survive. And I will tell you that if we want to resuscitate more patients from cardiac arrest we need to learn from the Formula 1 pit crews. And what is it that we can learn from the Formula 1 pit crews? Well if you look at the Formula 1 pit crew they will always have the same amount of people for each task. They all know each other, they all have the same training, the same experience and they know when this is being said this is being done. In contrast if we take a look on the picture in the bottom here we see a resuscitation team trying to resuscitate a patient. These teams are not standardized and they do not know each other on the team. So if you look at two resuscitation teams in two hospitals they'll be very different. In one hospital there might be twice as many people as in the other and in yet another hospital they will be twice as experienced as in the first. But the interesting thing is that it's not only the teams that differ in hospitals it's also the quality of the resuscitation and the chance of surviving a cardiac arrest. So in my PhD we're combining data from observational studies, clinical registries, randomized studies and also simulated resuscitation attempts. By doing that we hope to find out not only how big should the team be but also how experienced do they need to be and how is it that we communicate in the best possible way when we resuscitate the patients. So by the end of my PhD we will know how we can get the resuscitation teams to work a bit more like a Formula 1 pit crew and save more patients' lives. Thank you. Thank you Kasper and then Manuel. Internet search engines, digital assistants and language translators, they seem magical and that is because they are composed of subsystems and subsystems and even more subsystems that address different aspects of human language and all of this in order to find cheaper restaurants near me or to translate into Danish is this the train to Copenhagen? When these systems fail it is often due to their flawed understanding of human language and these failures have real-world consequences like a translation creating an embarrassing situation or a message saying I love you sent to the wrong person. In my PhD I researched one of the fundamental aspects of computer systems working with human languages it's called word representations. You see computers cannot understand the meaning of words they need us to give them ways they can learn representations of words and these representations have to be meaningful they should encode information that computers can use unfortunately computing word representations is a time-consuming task even on powerful and expensive computers it can take weeks and sometimes even months and when the representations are computed it is often not clear what information they contain and how we can use that information to address the causes of embarrassing situations. My research has shown that a popular kind of word representation called word clusters are highly effective at encoding information about grammatical role thus they make it easy to distinguish between nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs we can now construct systems that can address tasks that require information about grammatical role. However constructing word clusters still takes time so we looked at the way they are constructed and found ways to reduce this time in some cases computer training stations have been reduced from three weeks to three days. In another project we turned to word representations in order to make it easier for humans to read text with lots and lots of abbreviations. We use a kind of representation called word vectors to construct a system that reads every single article on Wikipedia and it does that in order to find out what abbreviations exist what do they mean and when are the different meanings used. With this information our system can disobligate hundreds of abbreviations directly in place in the sentence where they are used. This way making text easier for humans to read and avoiding those cases when you have to turn to a colleague and say excuse me what does PCB mean in this sentence here. These are just a couple of the ways research into word representations helps systems better understand what we mean when we say words. So next time you find yourself embarrassed by computers clumsiness with human languages just forgive them they're still learning. Thank you Manuel and then we have Mia. Too many pupils leave school without having acquired the basic skills. We know that one of the most significant things about acquiring basic skills is the teacher and we also know that it is the teachers way of being a teacher that is significant. My thesis is that some teachers are talented and significant really good teachers and that most teachers have the ability and the desire of becoming a really significant good teacher. So what characterizes this significant good teachers phenomenon and who should we ask. Teachers and researchers have given interesting answers to this question but as it appear no one scientifically asked the ones who had the experience with the significant good teachers. So therefore I'm asking the pupils or not quite of ethical reasons and because that I'm interested in the long term effects as well. I'm asking former pupils about their childhood experiences with significant good teachers. So as you can see on the picture here I'm dealing with the dusty memories here. The 38 respondents that I interviewed twice they have diverse backgrounds. They are in the age from 22 to 81 so they come from all different kinds of newer school history. I'm just finishing this interviewing part of the research process but already now several matters already stands out of the 76 interviews that I had even though that meaning hasn't been generated systematically yet and one of these aspects that stands out is the phenomenon of relationship. It appears that a teacher's strong relationship with the class as a whole is just as important for the individual child or pupil and even more important actually it shows that a teacher's strong relationship with the individual pupil itself. The aim of this project is to qualify some ethical standards for new language and sorry. Thank you Mia. So the final presentation before the break will be from Sa. Have you ever heard of cervical cancer? Each year around 300 000 women worldwide die from this cancer and think about this one in seven of these women experience a recurrence of their cancer and these recurrences are often not detected in time mainly because there are not many symptoms of this cancer. But what if I told you that a simple blood sample taken before and after cervical cancer treatment can be used to detect these recurrences before they've had the time to develop. Today it's well known that human papillomavirus which you would probably know as HPV is the main cause of almost all cases of cervical cancer. The virus spreads mainly through sexual contact and actually up to 80 percent of all people will have had an HPV infection at least once in their lives. Normally this virus is cleared by the person's immune system but for some reason an infection can develop into cancer. Circulating tumor DNA is described as released cancer DNA circulating in the blood and it carries specific information on the cancer that it stems from. This gives us the opportunity to detect cancers at very early stages. By using a very sensitive method we have already confirmed that HPV can be measured in the blood of cervical cancer patients and we hypothesize that an increase in the HPV level of these women indicates an upcoming recurrence. And if we're able to confirm this hypothesis we would have developed a new method to detect these recurrences much earlier than what's the case today. Cervical cancer affects so many young women with their whole lives ahead of them and actually up to half of these women are under 35 years. It's therefore extremely important that we have a method to detect recurrences before they occur. By measuring HPV level before and after the treatment for cervical cancer my hope is that we become able to save the lives of many women who would otherwise have had a recurrence of their cancer. And since HPV is known to also cause other types of cancers this new method could be a lifesaver for many more people. Thank you. So I think we should if we could ask you to find your seats and let's get ready for the final nine. And I think we have everybody in place up here and we're ready so if everybody have found their seats again I'll just without any further due leave the floor to Tia. Some of you being here today might be parent or maybe a grandparent of a young child if so you may have experienced what I have when picking up my kids from daycare because we naturally want to know what our kids have been up to so we ask what have you been doing today and I think that at least some of you can follow me when I say that a typical answer it could be something like I don't know I can't remember or maybe even nothing one reason for this might of course be that the child just doesn't want to answer however reasons are shown that these kinds of open-ended direct questions are very hard for the child to answer as they have to use to front the lobes and at a young age the front the lobes are still not matured but when retrieving memories spontaneously that is memories popping up in the child's mind almost out of the blue they don't have to use the front lobes in the same way so this made me curious about what types of cues that typically trigger these spontaneous memories and I can tell you that it is important for us to expand and knowledge about this as for instance sometimes a child might be the only witness of a crime and knowing how hard it is for them to retrieve memories when asked directly we have to think of other ways to get information from them so we explored the relevance of cues in two studies in an experiment the child was brought to the lab twice at the first visit I showed the child one of two amusing events for instance I'm singing teddies which are hidden in one of two boxes at the second visit the child is left alone in the room together with the parent of course while we film where the child looks and what it says and many children do talk spontaneously about the event remembered although they can't see the hidden teddies also on average the children having spontaneous memories looked about five times longer at the box containing the event content compared to the other box so this tells us that objects actually seem to enhance spontaneous memory retrieval as for the second study there's one thing I would like to highlight because here the parents were so kind and they fulfill the diary of the children's spontaneous memories along with aspects such as cues after doing this I asked the children some questions about the last memories reported and only about 20 percent of the children were able to answer one or more questions which is very interesting because these were memories they had recently be talking about at home so once again this shows us that it's very hard for the children to retrieve memories when asked directly if the relevant cues are not present so next time you pick up your child from daycare you might want to ask about his day in a slightly different way thank you for your attention thank you thank you too and then next is sa do you know what your risk of getting cancer is well one out of three of you sitting here today will be diagnosed with cancer during your lifetime but what if I told you that there is something that can increase your chances of surviving a cancer disease and it is not some new cancer drug no it is actually early detection because the main reason why people die from cancer is because it's diagnosed too late but if we can find it early we can increase survival rates and spare people of long and painful treatments so finding cancer early is basically the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against it we know that screening for colon cancer can find cancer early and therefore we started to screen people in Denmark in 2014 using a fecal test but the problem is that only 60 percent will participate and also the test sensitivity is limited this means that more than half of all cancers in the population are not detected so we need better screening tools and that is where my research comes in my phd aimed to develop a new test for early detection of colon cancer in a simple blood sample because we know that if we use a blood test instead of a fecal test we can make more people participate in screening the blood contains free-floating DNA and in cancer patients some of this DNA comes from the cancer tissue in our test we use a very sensitive technique to detect this cancer DNA in the blood we have used our test on hundreds of cancer patients and healthy people and found amazing positive results our test detected cancer 85 percent of the time in patients and only one percent of healthy individuals was false positive this is better than the fecal test so by using this blood test we expect to find more cancers and that fewer people will have a false positive test result in a world where cancer rates are constantly increasing because we are growing older finding the cancer early becomes even more important so my hope is that these results will make more people survive a cancer diagnosis in the future thank you very much thank you sir and then we have simon i would like to convince you that you can not only train your muscles but you can also train your fat so you can think of your fat stores as a bathtub where fats are coming in from the diet through the tap on your right hand side and if a lot of fat is coming in you either need a big bathtub or you need to remove the plug very often but interestingly it's not the size of the bathtub itself that matters what matters is the ability of your body fat stores to keep the body fat within the adipose tissue where it belongs so on your left hand side if too much fat comes into the bathtub it gets stored in other compartments of the body which is increasing the risk for metabolic disease one thing that is important with the bathtub is the plug and that's tightly regulated so when we rest the plug is in but when we exercise the plug is removed in order to fuel the working muscles with fat during exercise and a number of proteins are responsible for the function of the bad body fat stores including the the plug function so me and my research group we set out to investigate if the amount of certain proteins changed with exercise training so we took 19 healthy male subjects in two groups one group exercised three times a week for 10 weeks while the other group served as sedentary controls and we took out the biopsy from the abdominal region of the body fat and investigated the expression of a variety of proteins and we actually found that one protein essential for the plug function while we are resting increased with exercise training which means that while we are resting then less fat is released to the circulation which is actually what we wanted we wanted to keep the body fat where it belongs so you can actually train your fat and from a general perspective we think that our findings may contribute to a more sorry a less black versus white view on our body fat stores so that our body fat is not only about judging it by size it's judging it by the quality and we found that exercise is at least one way to improve the quality of your body fat thank you for your attention thank you Simon and then it's the Stefano since the times of Christopher Columbus the oceans have played a vital role in international law and for humankind as a whole the oceans contain innumerable resources and for example world trade flows through sea lanes connecting the various continents the fruit we buy every day at the supermarket the gasoline that powers our cars have probably been transported by ship therefore the question of who is entitled to regulate and to exploit the sea it's fundamental to these days for this reason i chose to study the historical development of the law of the sea which is the set of rules governing maritime interactions between different nations i especially focus on the beginning of ocean going navigation and the role that played in this development as the first europeans started to sail across the oceans they felt the need of establishing a legal status for the oceans i believe that the analysis of how the first europeans dealt with this issue can bring light to today's situation where in the end there is still this strong tension between sovereignty and freedom with regard to the oceans in particular i analyze the genesis of these of two principles dealing with the oceans the first the closed sea principle under which it is possible for states to acquire sovereignty possession of the sea and on the other the freedom of the seas which includes the freedom of navigation the freedom of fishing and the idea that the sea cannot be possessed by by men the arguing between the supporters of these two opposite views about the oceans later brought a compromise and sort of widely accepted law of the sea i believe that studying today the arguments used to defend one principle and the other can be still extremely relevant since for example we see that today there is this strong friction between freedom and sovereignty for example in the south china sea or with regard to the arctic seas to the north of the globe thank you thank you stifano and then we have a group last year a family friend passed away from complications diabetes at age 55 his wife afterwards discovered a whole pile of untaken medicine hidden in the corner of his bedroom then everyone finally realized why his diabetes had gotten worse so quickly he had not been taking his medicine research shows that 50 percent for all people with a chronic disease like diabetes don't take their medication as prescribed medication non-compliance causes 200 000 deaths each year from the EU there are various reasons for this but the one major reason is a fear of side effects many diabetes medicines have severe side effects that's also why scientists are constantly looking for better alternatives and myself have been working with a group of active natural compounds extracted from the medicinal plant stevia some of these compounds are nicely sweet and have been used as food sweeteners maybe you know coca-cola stevia but however we found that as certain concentrations these compounds also possess anti-diabetic effects we know that diabetes is characterized by high blood sugar and insulin hormone that can reduce blood sugar but here is a question for diabetic patients which one is worse high blood sugar or low blood sugar surprisingly low blood sugar is the most dangerous and common side effects of current diabetes medications it may cause heart disease nerve damage or even death when we tested stevia compounds we used insulin producing eye lids that we isolated from mouse pancreas we made them into diabetes models and healthy models then we treated them with our compounds the results well in diabetes models stevia compounds significantly increase insulin release very effective more importantly in healthy models stevia compounds had no detectable effects this is actually fascinating because it indicates when healthy when blood sugar is normal even patients accidentally taking more stevia will not over stimulate insulin secretion thereby preventing low blood sugar so stevia compounds have the potential to prevent low blood sugar it's still early stage of the research but i believe this study will lead to a safe therapy for diabetic patients maybe we can even utilize their effects and sweeteners together then diabetic patients taking candy can finally be doctor recommended wouldn't that be sweet thank you thank you gu and then we have yet another simon good afternoon when i was a kid i remember getting a game boy you know one of these handheld gaming devices the size of a small brick really and i remember my dad told me that the computing power of my game boy was as strong as the first lunar landing space shuttle computer and you know computers have just kept growing in power actually on this dotted black line we see something like a proxy for the technology of computers and how it's grown over time but i want to draw your attention to the blue line here behind me as well and you can see that's also growing very fast it's a slightly younger technology is the technology of dna reading now we know why we need computers otherwise we couldn't play candy crush but why do we need to read dna see dna is a data set and it's hidden inside the cells of our body this data set is kind of like the code inside the computer it tells the organism something about how to function and dna evolved with life so it tells us something about our ancestry but it also tells us something about who we are today and in a hospital we might want to read dna because sometimes dna gets sick it can mutate and these tiny changes in the code that is what in some patients cause cancer one of the challenges to working with dna is it's really really complex if just one patient coming into the doctor's office getting diagnosed with cancer we take out a few cells and we put it into one of these dna reading machines we get the cancer dna out let's say we want to print it on paper to show our doctor we're going to get a stack of paper which is 130 meters tall that's a lot of information not very nice for a doctor's read so i exploit that we have computer technology stronger than ever i take 130 meters of data and i put it into my computer and inside of there we tell the differences between the sick cell and the healthy cell because these differences tell us something about why is the patient sick and maybe even what we can do about it in particular i'm curious about the fact about healthy cell dna namely there is an auto correct system when breaks happen there's an auto correction scanning the code repairing all the spelling errors in cancer cells this system doesn't seem to work well enough and i think if we can understand the auto correction better it'll give us tools for understanding cancer evolution but also potential tools for how we can choose better treatment and develop better treatment so i believe in a future of medicine where we use the superpowers of computer technology and dna reading in giving doctors the best possible tools for providing patients for the best possible treatment thank you simon and then we have sofia i imagine the most of the people in this room agree that this is not a bladder well for people from my field that this radiation oncology a bladder is like a balloon and i will explain to you why that is related to my research that is to understand why urinary side effects occur after radiotherapy and service cancer patients this disease is one of the most common types of cancer women especially in countries without access to screening and vaccination so ladies please do screening and radiotherapy is often the treatment of choice and modern techniques showed an improved survival of patients as well as a reduction of side effects due to treatment but even if in a lesser extent urinary side effects are still present affecting the quality of life of cancer survivors even many years after treatment and we don't know why it happens the causes are not fully understood and this is not an issue just for cervix but all the tumors in the pelvic area so there is a lot of research going on on this topic to put some light on how to improve our understanding then first we need clinical trials studies to reliably assess how often the side effects occurs and how bad they are and i'm lucky because i'm part of the embrace study a large trial on cervix cancer treated with radiotherapy the disconnecting information from more than 1,400 patients from all around the world including patient tumor treatment characteristics as well as follow-up from months up to years after treatment we really have the chance to understand what's going on but then there is another issue because when we radiation oncologists or medical physicists like me create a treatment plan we want to kill the tumor with radiation but we don't want to damage all the healthy organs around because we don't want side effects after treatment and we consider the bladder as a single entity which each part has the same function as a balloon then to make it explode it only matters how strong you hit it not where but urinary side effects are complex including different symptoms and thinking that all of them have the same cause is a bit simplistic we have to move to a more realistic idea of the bladder and this is the basis of my research using the large amount of embrace data i'm identifying greeks factors responsible for urinary side effects including substructures in the bladder as well as other parameters related to patient treatment and and guaranteeing patient the most efficient and safe treatment thank you thank you so fear and then next up is vincent can you guess how i fell in love with electric cable bacteria let me tell you the story from the beginning last year i went snorkeling a little out of town up north the place called lectin strand the water was so clear and there was seagrass with these long green leaves everywhere the water was so nice and i actually saw a big trout hiding in between seagrass leaves seagrasses and other aquatic plants not only provide shelter for fish but also have long roots burrowing organic carbon deep down into the sediment where it is captured helping to fight against climate change so a couple of days later i really wanted to dive into that beautiful world again and i drove to marsalis borhaber jumped into the water and i was shocked not a single seagrass leaf around instead murky water what happens in between lectin strand and marsalis borhaber happens gradually on a global scale human activities cause huge die-off events of aquatic plants for instance human activities like dredging cause murky water and with murky water the plants receive less light are less active and that is when the roots become vulnerable to sulfide and you know sulfide smells like rotten eggs and is actually toxic for plants so now i would like to convince you that with the help of electric cable bacteria the sulfide around the roots could be efficiently removed but how to imagine this let's pretend that everyone here in this room is a single cable bacterium cell and the wooden pillars on the on the outside are the roots and your cells sitting close to the root actually can breathe the oxygen which gets released from the roots all the other cells however you cannot reach that oxygen but you are surrounded by sulfide and luckily you like to eat sulfide so the only way to breathe and eat at the same time is to cooperate so please everyone let's cooperate and bring our hands up and hold your neighbor's hands forming long cable bacteria filaments and now you're producing electric currents which may allow to eat up all the toxic sulfide around the roots and keep the plants happy so next time you go out for a swim mind your step avoid walking through the seagrass meadows because now you know they protect fish and climate and there's a whole electric world underneath thank you thank you vincent and now it's time for our last presentation from samika i'm here to tell you that fixing a hole in the heart does not fix everything your heart is the size of your fist consisting of four chambers two small atrias and two larger ventricles as you can see on the image here now imagine being born with one of the most common heart defects a hole in the wall dividing the two smaller chambers an atrial septal defect if the hole is large you will experience shortness of breath getting tired very easily and failure to grow and in these instances it is important to close the hole for years we assumed that patients were completely healthy after closing the defect we then learned that they still experience complications such as abnormal heart rhythm and they generally die eight years earlier than you and me we have yet to understand why this occurs so we can help them live just as long as the rest of us and without any problems we examine adults born with an atrial septal defect who had it closed sometime during their lives we scan their hearts using ultrasound that's the same method you use in pregnant bellies and this tells us how the heart pumps we measure the blood pressures in the heart and lung circulation this tells us how soft and flexible the blood vessels are we examine patients when they're resting but also on a bicycle you may be okay if you don't do anything at all but most of us live an active lifestyle and it is important that our heart can cope with that my project is ongoing and we're still gathering results so I can't draw any conclusions yet but our results may lead to two scenarios number one if we find an abnormal heart function we can explain the long-term complications in the shorter lifetime we can start relevant medical treatment earlier on thereby optimizing the heart's function and this means that we can postpone the occurrence of or maybe even fully avoid some complications scenario number two should be on the other hand learn that these patient examinations are all normal that our patients don't differ at all from our heart healthy people we can close this door and safely state that the dynamics in the heart aren't the cause for the problems we see we should always continuously strive to optimize quality of life for our patients fixing a hole in the heart is great but there's more fixing to do thank you thank you and I think we should give them all a hand well done and having seen you before I can tell you could probably see that some of them were nervous others didn't seem so and from having seen them before you wouldn't know who was nervous before they have really worked on that and now it's time for the jury to deliberate so I will leave them to that and again we are ahead of schedule very much it says 20 minutes so let's meet again a quarter two and remember we have the people's choice of order as well so I'll give you five minutes to have a chat about your personal top threes and then I'll just go and find three four five of you and then we'll make a top three and then we'll have the popular vote here after the break but please enjoy the break we have our jury back after a long deliberation that's a good sign it shows that you all did well and it has been a tough decision we're just glad that we didn't have like the you to give you a three months extension or something to to to reach a decision heavily it was a bit faster than that but we will begin by the people's choice award and that was obviously a tough one as well I had to ask more than five people to get any sense of a picture of the top three because everybody had three different people that they have they had preferred so again well done shows that you all did a really good job but a decision had to be made and so the top three we'll invite them here on the stage and then we'll just do a show of hands and see who'll be the the winner so here on the stage I'd like to see Gu and Catherine and finally Vincent so and this time you only have one vote each so oh yes everybody here gets to vote so now so now you want to make sure that your friends and family vote for you or do we want to make sure we have those votes for you so the best presentation day uh was that Vincent yes or and Catherine yes or now I was just about to do a John Birkhoff and say clear the lobby but I'm afraid I don't have that kind of kind of power here but I I I think there's a a by a small margin the winner is a gu of the beauty congratulations and congratulations to you as well thank you very much please and we I think we have some flowers and a small present for you and a small diploma as well cheers thank you and then to the final winner of the competition so I'll leave the photo right so we're about to have this decision made and I would like to say first that from the side of the jury this is you guys have made it extremely difficult for us to reach this decision I mean you were all very very good so we were down into the margins to really understand or figure out who was who is the winner so so some of the things we looked as looked at is how well did you come across obviously how well did you use your slide and how well did you match the time that you had allocated so the winner we have chosen was very good at storytelling the person kept the audience captivated throughout the three minutes had a very simple slide but used it to create a visual and emotional feeling let's say in the in the audience and even engage the audience so we're very happy to announce that our winner is Vincent Schultz well thank you coming out here today to celebrate this next generation of researchers it has been a pleasure to have you here today especially thanks to the jury for making a decision that I don't think others wanted to make and then first and foremost thank you to all of you for entertaining and enlightening us today it has been a pleasure to follow you all the way through this and please come on stage and a round of applause again thank you so much for doing this and trying this and being bringing the brave contestants and we wish you all the luck with your PhD projects and your future careers and we also have a small something for the jury so a small thank you for them as well and well you're done here we have a diploma for you and something to keep it in once once you've received it okay thank you so much have a good evening