This year the Warwick Physics Three Minute Thesis challenge returned with an intense competition. The premise? Our plucky postgraduate presenters had to passionately précis the point of their PhD projects in a pitch, neither prompt nor prop permitted. Three minutes only, unaided but for personal wit, charm and a single static slide, our entrants poured their hearts and souls out to confer their research, relevance and results to a panel of their peers. They were judged on their overall presentation skills, the clarity of their concise conferrals and how well they sold their projects, as if giving an elevator pitch with limited investable capital.

Sam Seddon of Condensed Matter fame and Matthew Battley from Astrophysics both prepared wonderful speeches and beautiful graphics to translate their work from arcane to approachable. Tim Cunningham and Patrick Cronin-Coltsmann from the Astro Group also bravely took to the stage to explain their extra-terrestrial esoterica after volunteering from the floor! The competition was as close as could be with some entrants scoring within one percentage point of each other! But at the end of the day there could be only one winner, and the coveted £50.00 prize went to Patrick Cronin-Coltsmann Runner up prizes went to Matthew Battley and Tim Cunningham.

Patrick spoke about his work trying to figure out whether small stars, like the famous Trappist-1, are truly better at making Earth-like planets than Sun-like stars. He does this by looking at the rings of debris created around those small stars when small planets and asteroids crash into each other, to see how good they are at turning their original dust into larger objects.

The competition allowed the audience to get an inside look into their peer’s research, in a directly understandable format. Having been given a taste of the fascinating science going on around the department, many questions and conversations were afterwards generated with all of the speakers. The speakers themselves had the opportunity to informally share their work and to exercise their ability to communicate their work in an accessible format for a general audience, an invaluable skill for any scientist.

The Three Minute Thesis Competition will be running again same time next year and the entire Physics postgraduate community is welcome to participate! So get your brains in gear and keep your eyes and ears open for its announcement!