3-Minute Thesis Competition 2022

By Rachel Boutet

The Faculty of Dentistry recently held its annual 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition where graduate students had only three minutes and one slide to showcase their research to a lay audience.

“This competition emphasizes the important role communication plays in scientific research,” says Laurent Bozec, associate professor. “It’s wonderful to have great research, but being able to effectively communicate it to a wider audience is important for expanding its impact.”

Bozec, along with associate professor Laura Dempster, have been helping prepare students for the 3MT competition as well as teach them communication skills with the Oral Health Sciences Seminar course they co-teach. Bozec and Dempster were also co-organizers of the 3MT event.

The participants were judged by a panel of five judges as well as an audience vote. The judges graded each presentation for comprehensibility, engagement level, and effective communication. The winning three candidates were: Maryam Zanjir for her presentation entitled “Your Wish is my command”, Shivam Sharma for his presentation entitled “Diabetic Wounds: Heels that don’t heal”, and Omnia Elebyary for her presentation entitled “Bacterial Barcodes”. They will progress to a final round, which will be held at the Faculty’s Research Day on February 8, 2022. The winner of the Research Day competition will move on to the University of Toronto semi-final competition.

“Although only three winners were chosen, I hope all participants will walk away with even stronger communication skills,” says Dempster. “It’s not easy to condense all of your research into a three-minute story, but everyone did a fantastic job and I’m very proud of them all.”

The other participants who presented their research at the 3MT Competition included: 

• Pedram Mouseli: “Identifying a novel neuromuscular biomarker signature of chronic TMD”
• Mina Vaez Ghasemi: “Re-engineering Natural Collagen”
• Nadeen Mahmoud Meshry: “Generating DNA hydrogels for Bone Tissue Regeneration”
• Faraz Moharrami: “Risk Assessment in Dentistry”
• Hetal Desa: “No Drill Dentistry: A New Reality”
• Pardis Riahi: “Lyme Disease: no boundary inside nor outside!”
• Haowei Zhao: “Sleeping’ bacteria, their role in chronic biofilm infections”
• Nandita Menon: “Tooth-on-a-chip: Predicting the Unpredictable”
• Yihan Li: “Self-assembled nano composite coatings for reducing the antimicrobial resistance”
• Diego Proano Falconi: “A smile, but at what cost?”
   

Photo: Zoom capture of the 3MT participants, judges and organizers