An 80,000 word PhD thesis would take 9 hours to present. Their time limit… 3 minutes.

Stefania Peracchi, from the , won UOW’s Three Minute final, receiving $1500 and an invitation to the 2020 Virtual Asia-Pacific 3MT Competition.

The Three Minute Thesis competition looked a little different this year, with students live-streaming their presentations instead of presenting to a live audience.

But the concept was still the same as competing PhD students whittled down an 80,000-word thesis to a 3-minute presentation, using language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.

Stefania presented her PhD research in developing wearable and affordable radiation detectors for astronauts, to measure their exposure to cosmic rays in real-time.

Her supervisors are Associate Professor Susanna Guatelli, Dr Linh Tran, Distinguished Professor Anatoly Rozenfeld from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences and Dr Dale Prokopovich from ANSTO.

Engeering and Information Sciences (EIS) had four competitors in the faculty final

There are competition stages, with students first battling it out at faculty level and then the best two progressing to the university-wide competition.

Recent graduate Jiahong Zhao won the faculty level competition with his presentation Smarter ears for Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, while Stefania was awarded People’s Choice.

Jiahong and Stefania then competed against the rest of the university at the UOW 3MT Final, and swapped their placings, with Stefania winning overall and Jiahong awarded People’s Choice.

EIS Associate Dean – Research Senior Professor Roger Lewis said “EIS early career researchers have done the faculty proud, hearty congratulations to Stefania and Jiahong,”.