July 17, 2018

Engineering student on the right track with Three Minute Thesis win

Competition presents ground-breaking work of UOW Higher Degree Research students

Engineering student Chuhao Liu (pictured above) is the winner of this year’s University of Wollongong Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition final, held on Thursday 12 July.

Chuhao’s research focuses on improving the stability and reliability of Australia’s rail network, and the title of his winning presentation was "Find the best ‘jeans’ for railway foundations".

Samson Soulsby from the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts was the runner-up for his presentation on “Monster in the Mirror: Personhood in Contemporary Monster Fiction”.

The audience voted Jenny Norman, a PhD candidate from the Faculty of Social Sciences, the winner of the People’s Choice award for her talk on the topic, “Sustained impact of energy dense food advertising on children's dietary intake”.

The 3MT Competition is a platform for UOW Higher Degree Research students to communicate the purpose and importance of their research using language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.

It aims to help students develop their ability to communicate and explain academic concepts in a succinct and effective way, while also providing an entertaining way for the community to learn about the ground-breaking research that UOW students are undertaking.

The 12 finalists, who came from across UOW’s faculties, had three minutes with which to engage the audience on the research of their thesis topic, with the assistance of one PowerPoint slide.

(Left) 3MT runner-up Samson Soulsby, who gave a presentation on “Monster in the Mirror: Personhood in Contemporary Monster Fiction”; (Right) People’s Choice winner Jenny Norman, who spoke on “Sustained impact of energy dense food advertising on children's dietary intake”.

For Chuhao, the win in the 3MT Final comes on the back of his win earlier this year in the Cooperative Research Centre Association’s Australian-wide Early Researchers Showcase Competition.

He said he was attracted to a career in rail engineering for the potential it offered to have a positive impact on the world.

“What I really want to achieve in my research is to improve the standard for rail manufacturing so that we can lower costs and improve the efficiency of rail transport.

“The NSW Government alone spends $12 million every year on track maintenance. My research shows that we can reduce track maintenance by 25 per cent, and at the same time increase the life of the tracks.

“This is also really important for all the big rail projects that Australia is undertaking, such as the flagship Melbourne to Brisbane Inland Rail.”

The other 3MT finalists and their topics were:

• Emily Ryan, Faculty of Business, “Examining Supply Chain Practice for the Sustainable Buildings Industry: Towards Viable Cluster Development”;
• Dharshika Kongahage, Australian Institute for Innovative Materials, “Artificial Muscles for Heart”;
• Benjamin Stephens-Fripp, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, “Giving back the sense of touch”;
• Beata Bukosa, Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health, “Missing pieces: Imitating our Earth system”;
• Tashi Dendup, Faculty of Social Sciences, “The influence of the residential environment on type 2 diabetes prevention”;
• Guoqiang Zhao, Australian Institute for Innovative Materials, “Heterostructures: where one plus one is more than two”;
• Qinqing Xu, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, “Music copyright in a digital environment”;
• Meagan Lowe, Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health, “Reef island erosion in Isabel Province, Solomon Islands”.