our 7eventh annual thre minute thesis competition are you excited this is one of our Premier Events I'm Scott Adler the dean of The Graduate School great to have you here today this is really probably my favorite event that we do in The Graduate School each year so I'm so excited about it um for many of you are graduate students teaching The Graduate uate School alums of The Graduate School you know graduate school is about 6,000 graduate students in 130 different programs throughout their time
here The Graduate students um do all different kinds of research and creative work acquiring worldclass expertise as they train to become the next generation of teachers Scholars artists and researchers now they do this in part thanks to the generous support of our donors who fund the fellowships and Grants awarded by The Graduate School each year you hopefully notice the slideshow on the screen behind me it's not quite sliding but uh it was before um highlighting some of the recipients of some
of these different fellowships so I want to take a moment uh to recognize the outstanding achievements of our granes thank you very much so from astrophysics to dance our graduate students are pushing the boundaries of their disciplines and with the guidance of our outstanding faculty gaining the necessary skills and tools to tackle some of the most complex and pressing issues of our day one reflection of the Excellence of our graduate students here at CU Boulder is that we consistently rank amo
ng the top 10 universities in the number of students receiving the NSF graduate research Fellowship one of the nation's most competitive and prestigious fellowships for graduate study and yet much of the amazing research flies under the radar is and is only fully understood and appreciated by a small group of Specialists within within their disciplines in many ways this is a missed opportunity to advance our understanding of science the value of research and the remarkable scholarship going on h
ere at CU and that's why I love the three-minute thesis event it's not only a way for us to Showcase their incredible work but also a wonderful opportunity for students to present the elevator pitch for their research they do that by summarizing their sophisticated and sometimes obscure research and Analysis in ways that is accessible for a general and everyday audience learning how to do this is no easy task and requires training and practice starting last fall 25 graduate students began a seri
es of workshops to prepare for this competition these workshops were focused on storytelling writing presentation skills and even one on improv comedy techniques as you can see our 10 finalists competing today worked very hard to get here their presentations are absolutely fabulous now let me introduce our MC for today's event my dear friend Bud Coleman who is the r green endowed chair in theater Bud will introduce our judges and set the stage for the competition welcome bud and thanks for being
with us thank you Scott and welcome everyone to the uh University of Colorado three minute thesis academic competition thank you for your support of Graduate Studies here at CU the three-minute thesis academic competition 3mt actually started at the University of Queensland in 2008 3mt cultiv uh cultivates students presentation and research communication skills and challenges them to describe their research to a general audience in 3 minutes to give you an idea of the challenge of this Prospect
the average dissertation is about 80,000 Words which would take 12 hours to say out loud so these students have taken 12 hours of material and distilled it down into 3 minutes the 3mt competition is now very popular worldwide it's in over 900 universities in 85 countries around the world this is the seventh year of the competition here at CU Boulder the first PL prize the first place winner will receive $1,500 in research money and the opportunity to represent CU Boulder in the Western Associat
ion of Graduate Studies uh competition which will be held in March of this year our runner up will receive $750 in prize money and the winner of our PE People's Choice Award will receive $500 the rules are very simple a s single static PowerPoint slide is permitted no slide transitions animations or movement the the slide is to remain uh steady from the beginning to the end of the oration no additional Electronic media no sound or video files are permitted no additional props sound uh musical in
struments or laboratory uh equipment is permitted presentations are limited to three minutes if anyone goes over they will be disqualified presentations are to be in the spoken word no poems songs or rap is allowed so we need to thank our 10 finalists who are here today let's give a round of applause because they are all winners on behalf of the graduate school and these amazing presenters I want to thank you our audience both here in person and Via Zoom to for supporting intellectual inquiry sc
ientific discovery artistic creation and the dissemination of knowledge to the public it is now my great uh honor to introduce our esteemed panel of Judges first up we have Nobel laet Eric Cornell fellow in the Jilla uh physics Frontier Center and adjoint professor of physics thank you Carl next up we have Lori M Hunter director of The Institute for Behavioral Studies and professor of Sociology thank you Lori next up Glenn Cruz dean of the College of uh College of Arts and Sciences I should know
this and a professor of political science thank you [Applause] Glenn next up Charles Musgrave associate Dean for graduate education in the College of Engineering and applied science and a professor of chemical and biological engineering thank you Charles the judges will focus on four main areas in their evaluation of each candidate comprehension content engagement and communication while we have our esteemed panel of Judges you our in-person and virtual audience can all vote for The People's Ch
oice Awards today so take notes during the 10 10 presentations and at the end there will be a QR code on the screen and one in the chat of the webinar to show uh you how you can place your vote that QR code will be up for 10 minutes so you can place your vote the focus of 3mt is storytelling in its purest form one human being using the spoken word to introduce an audience to new ideas new ways of seeing the world we are so glad that you are here at this event to gather around the fire to hear wh
at our community members want to share with us today today the present uh presentation order has been randomly assigned today so first up I'd like to invite Leanne uh Kesler pH candidate in integrative physiology the title of her presentation is Aftershock when Co becomes long Co what if you broke your leg but doctors didn't believe you or provide treatment they say it's all in your head and yet your life slows down to a halt luckily in our society this doesn't happen in the case of a broken leg
however this was the experience for some people who survived covid-19 then developed long Co a disease which can cause a wide variety of problems like in the gut muscles and brain long Co is the second hidden pandemic that has now affected at least one in 14 people in the United States the aspiring neuroscientist of me was motivated to take action when I heard long Co affects the brain causing symptoms such as fatigue brain fog depression and anxiety I did some research and discovered that in c
ases of long covid a piece of the virus known as the spike protein was lasting longer in the body than the live virus so how does this protein work let's say you're mom is coming to visit but she's allergic to your pet cat so you got a pet sitter even though your cat isn't home your mom is still sneezing why it's because your cat sheds a lot of hair and it's still triggering her allergies that's how the spike protein seems to be working in particular the top piece S1 breaks off and can spread th
rough the body so the virus sheds S1 protein and the more it sheds the more damage it does based on this discovery my project project will examine what happens when S1 protein alone is given to myasia their nose since infection can start there 24 hours after giving my ss1 protein I scanned for active inflammatory genes in their brain tissue I found two genes were increased in samples from the hippocampus a region deep in the brain involved in memory when one gene is activated it can alert the im
mune system that a foreign pathogen is in the body the other Gene can cause cells to release a type of inflammatory protein known as a cyto which in excess could cause a cyto kind storm a cyto storm is an extreme inflammatory response which can result in organ failure or death I found it particularly interesting that S1 protein was able to cause inflammation without the live virus being present since it means it can act on its own when it's shed during infection going forward future treatments c
ould include clearing S1 protein from the body in order to protect against Co and long covid for a long time it was thought the brain was separate from the rest of the body but now we know that is not the case people living with long covid are experiencing a very real example of how inflammation in the brain can cause a burdensome disease but this can't be their new normal hopefully our Collective research on long covid will help lift the fog thank you [Applause] so after each presentation I'll
be asking the candidates a couple of uh brief questions so that our judges have time to make notes so Lanna you're up next you're up first so um outside of your academic work you noted that you enjoy hiking and camping I know we have a lot of uh hiking enthusiasts in the room so where do you enjoy hiking well I had a really good experience hiking um and camping in guanella pass uh we went there kind of early once for Memorial Day so we got hit with a blizzard but we still had a lot of fun spoken
like a true Colorado resident it was a blizzard but we had fun oh my goodness not me uh so I understand that New York Pizza is also one of your favorites now first of all you need to Define for us what is a New York Pizza so if you live close to New York City uh I grew up in New Jersey but I also went to New York a lot um get the benefits of New York City Pizza which is like a very good type of pizza some say it's in the water uh it could be the ratio of cheese to sauce it's just really good yo
u could have cheese pizza a lot of toppings doesn't matter just really good yeah so like anything from the dollar slice place on up yeah even from like Central Terminal you get a really good pizza you along with the rats so is there any place outside of New York that you think has good New York Pizza um maybe the probably not so really just stick to Manhattan yeah and maybe the tri state area okay all right so we get New Jersey a nod so uh you also let us know that you enjoy to sew and craft cos
tumes what do you make costumes for I like to make costumes like for Halloween or for fun events costume parties yeah it's just fun to do a variety of crafting order to make like a whole ensemble yeah so in Halloween 2023 what would what would we have seen you as uh probably Poison Ivy from Batman I think we need a round of applause for poison ivy so I also understand that you enjoy some board games what are some of your board game go-tos H we really like playing code names um it's a good one um
that company also makes the game like Galaxy truck trucker which is a pretty like intense game also still fun um Magic the Gathering Pokemon yeah stuff like that oh even Pokemon yeah okay so give us a hand up for poison ivy watch out for her playing board games [Applause] next up we have ruhan young PhD candidate in creative technology and design the title of their presentation is Kubo paper modular robot you can build at home I love Hands On Building I built my first robot 11 years ago in high
school from designing to building I learned all the different science and engineering Concepts it was a very important experience for me growing up and I wish more people especially teenagers could be engaged in such activity however Robo building kids are always expensive Lego is our most common choice and cost us more than $400 for most basic robotics kit the struggle is real robot building is valuable for steam education but it's not accessible to all so how can we help with that how can we
make Robo building more accessible it's not just about cutting down the price but the whole building process should also be approachable to address this my research focus on designing Cubo a set of modular robot that use you can make at home out of paper with everyday tools as sh on the screen each module can be fold out of one single sheet of paper but cuboards are more than just paper boxes each module has it own special function here on the top we have the distance measuring module you can te
ll how far away you are find and on the bottom we have this little screen module that can display different patterns this modu transfer power and data to each other so if we put them together we got a little cute robot that will show you a heart when you are approaching circuit boards are the key to those functions see The Shining Parts in the photo that's a circuit of Cubo and trust me there something you can build at home by cutting from coer tape I made the conductive stickers that can connec
t to different components so no matter how crazy hard the circuit looks like all all you need is just a sticker to make it and with a new soldering technique I proposed now you just need to add some Soder paste on the paper they're like school glue and then you threw everything into the oven bake it like a bread in our last Workshop high school student come to the lab and build cuboard within two and a half minutes that's even faster than me finish this presentation and the best part that only c
ost you five bucks with all the design open sourced so you see you can totally build robots at home robot building should and it could be more accessible so we could share the joy of Hands-On building to more people and we could prepare teenagers today to stand on this stage tomorrow to become designers Engineers scientists and people who can build their dreams thank you thank you ruhan thank you so I know your undergrad major was in mechanical engineering correct yes and that you almost became
a math graduate student but you decided to go into creative technology and design what steered you away from math well let's say I was major major in mechanical but I also minor applied math which basically means I'm kind of good at math you know so when I applied for grad grad school I was like oh I just need to you know get a degree and I'm also good at math so let's do math so I actually appli like seven or six program in math until like I noticed everyone around me the professor who write me
the recommendation letter the professor who was teaching me that semester all my co-workers in our startup company they said oh you have to try at this so I was like okay so what's the magic about ATL this right so give it a try and uh that's how it ends up here a good place to be this is a good place to be good so uh I understand that outside of your academic work you like to snowboard oh yeah and I understand that you had uh an extra special day at snowboarding yesterday can you tell us what
happened oh yeah I got concussion so say snowboarding that's that's a great exercise I'm trying to you know get some nervous out of me and I end up with concussion so barely feel anything right now yeah that's another way to feel good you know so basically ruhan will remember nothing of today so let's give her a big round of applause to help remember today thank you thank you no no you're not done yet you're not done yet yeah you're not done yet okay you won't remember this part either so I unde
rstand that sichan hot pot is one of your favorite dishes now for anyone in the audience who's not familiar with that dish would you please describe it so we got all kinds of hot po around the world right but the one that from my hometown sit is the most spicy one it's spicy as Hill and trust me you come to S one day and try the hop hop no matter where no matter which like hop hop place that is it's the best you will got around the world trust me c h is the best okay so if someone does get it to
o spicy for them what's the best way to calm their mouth down well we also got this special drink it's kind of like a soil milk but a special you know San version of it try it if you come to s no one know exactly what you're talking about we always always got that drink with hot hot it's the best so you heard it here first thank you ruhan thank you next up we have Alex Meyer PhD candidate in aerospace engineering the title of his presentation is binary asteroids and the dart impact there are ten
s of thousands of neear asteroids about one in six of those has its own small asteroid moon it's what we in the business call a binary asteroid these two asteroids they typically have unusual shape and they orbit each other very close together that means the gravitational forces between them are far more complicated than for example the Earth and our moon this means we don't fully understand these systems and their behavior is incredibly difficult to predict we can't build a lab to study half M
asteroids and zero gravity at least not with my funding so instead my research uses computer models to simulate these systems in order to better understand them in 2022 NASA performed the first planetary defense test and the target was the binary asteroid diyos the Mission named Dart involved the spacecraft impacting the moon of diddos and the goal was to see how effective we are at changing the orbit of an asteroid how much of a push can we give it but in order to answer that question we need t
o First build a better understanding of binary asteroids so these binary asteroids are actually relatively quite small meaning we can't really see them in any detail with our telescopes this means it's impossible to know exactly what happened after the dart impact instead telescopes give us just a few pieces of the puzzle and we're left to fit those pieces together fortunately my models provide context to what the telescopes see using these models is like looking at the picture on the box when y
ou're doing the puzzle so after running thousands of simulations and comparing the results to the limited data we do have we were able to calculate that Dart transferred more than three times its own momentum to the asteroid in other words a very big push this means the rocks in debris kicked up by the impact actually gave an extra push to the asteroid like a free rocket booster that's good news for planetary defense once the dust literally settled we could take an even closer look at at diddos
new data combined with these models helps us fill in missing pieces of the puzzle and build a more complete picture of what diddos looks like now and that's important because we're going back three years from now we'll return to diddos to study in depth the effects of the dart impact and we need to be prepared for what we'll find using this research approach so far we've determined that Dart transferred so much energy to the asteroid that the asteroid totally changed shape it used to look like a
hamburger but it's more like a football now and it's probably wobbling like a top that's about to fall over the dart impact is just one lens into my research in binary asteroids and while knowing how prepared we are for the worst case scenario of asid deflection is nice we now also have a more comprehensive understanding of one of the more common but poorly studied types of solar system objects thank you thank you Alex so Alex let us know that he enjoys outside of his academic work uh building
things with Legos and that he has uh right yes that is true you had that kind of look like no it's a lot of fun it's an expensive hobby though let me tell you well and that you've uh displayed your some of your Lego models at national conventions that is true so what have you built oh we built we built a number of things so uh what we're building right now is is this idea we were we we picked a topic and we said what do we want to build uh and the idea that we picked was actually wealth disparit
y I know super light for Legos right so so the thing that we built um it um we've got like we we split the display into two and we have half that's that's like this poor neighborhood really inspired by like Brazilian faas and then we have the other half is like this really nice resort and we stuck them together and I thought it was really cool um I don't think the judges really got what we were trying to say though and so when you say we a team of how many people oh this would be me and my two b
rothers and then we also build with my cousin some also and do we know how many pieces were in that I don't even I don't even know I know no thousands okay uh what else have you built um let's see uh in in my younger days we were a little bit more Whimsical uh we built a like a a an a prison Colony on an asteroid uh super whims yeah um but that was that was a fun one to build also yeah well when we were real young kids that we had across our whole basement a really big city set up that was a lot
of fun my mom didn't think so so much um but yeah we had a lot of fun on that one excellent so I don't know if you and lyanna have compared NOS but you both like to hike so real original for Colorado right yeah I know but where do you enjoy hiking um my well I love the Front Range herea great hiking but my favorite would be the trails up by mafa tunnel Crater Lakes Trail fantastic backpack up there too sometimes a lot of fun excellent uh now if uh Alex and lyanna go on hike together they probab
ly better be careful about the subject of pizza now you already heard that lyanna is a very big fan of New York style pizza Alex on the other hand wrote that quote he likes his pizza healthy or uh greasy cheap or artisanal breakfast lunch or dinner vegetarian vegan and it scales up really well it's it's the most versatile food yes yes I'm not picky about my pizza in any sense uh it's it's perfect for any occasion okay but lyanna's kind of a purist the I I don't want to give into that debate I en
joy New York Pizza as much as the next guy okay we'll let we'll let it stay there uh now our next competitor also likes to read I understand that you do too so what are some titles you've enjoyed recently uh let's see I just finished reading the dispossessed uh fantastic book I do highly recommend maybe uh my my favorite that I've read though would be uh it's called the Mars Trilogy red Mars blue Mars green Mars it's about the colonization of Mars uh it's uh I'm really into sci-fi that is a heav
y sci-fi book uh that that's a bit of a slog if you're not really into the subject but it's also very good excellent well thank you Alex thank you next up we have Sima cosmi PhD candidate in advertising public reations and media design the title of their presentation today is psychological distance in ads and moral disagreement let me start by telling you a story not far from here there were seven Villages that relied on one source of water but over time that Source started declining a wise Vill
age man said that it was because too much of that water was being used to fatten up animals to eat so he designed a pamphlet and distributed it in the Village People looked at the message agreed with it but refus to change their habits eventually the pamphlets ended in the landfill but the water kept declining now what if I told you this is not a fictional scenario but is actually happening to the Colorado Riv River and the seven states that depend on [Music] It High Reliance on animal-based die
t is one of the biggest contributors to ghg gas emissions and a lot of Americans know this and want to do something about it yet very few follow through with sustainable choices so why do humans engage in activities that are damaging to the environment this is where my research comes in through a series of online experiments I want to understand what type of messaging creates what type of impact would emphasizing proximity and need for Action make any difference so what happens when we see an ad
pretty much like this one we look at it we scroll maybe pull up excuses from an Arsenal that animal-based diet are a great source of protein are good for the economy and there is absolutely no replacement for the the cheeseburger but when these justifications come in all persuasion fails and environmental messages pretty much like this one would end up in a landfill so I am hoping with my research I can address some of this cognitive mechanism by designing experiments I want to see whether a ce
rtain type of text make a difference whether creating a sense of proximity would make a difference or maybe creating an urgency for environmental action the answers of this question I still do not know I'm researching but I hope that these will guide Environmental Research in designing messages that have an impact so the next time I see a message just like this one I look at it think about it and maybe act and when more people like me act we can save this planet and this Village thank you thank
you Sima I understand after your degrees in Business Administration and in MBA in marketing that you were a social media manager for a digital advertising agency yes sir it sounds like that work directly related to then your dissertation topic so uh after working as a social media manager do you still use any social media platforms you just saw one my stimul designed around it and obviously most of the advertising is happening in this space so I still definitely use that were you surprised by wh
at you saw in that position yes I was there's a uh the reason I wanted to do research was because I wanted to understand that how difficult it is to persuade people to change habits so it brought me here excellent uh like Alex you enjoy reading uh what titles have you enjoyed lately um I read this book Human Stain by Philip Roth that was a very interesting book and uh then I had to work on my desertation I know the plight of a graduate student is true now I understand you have three children at
home uh so did you practice your 3mt presentation for them no why not I made a video I looked at it myself I I I don't think yeah they would uh yeah I'll show them the video once it's out there and that was it that was it thank you and so I understand that you also enjoy some podcasts what are you listening to now I uh recently I'm listening to philosophize this which is uh yeah they kind of have philosophical approach to a lot of what's happening in in AI in feminism and um so environmental jus
tice a lot of that so it's it's very interesting excellent well thank you so much Sima thank you for having me [Applause] bye next up we have Zachary schiffman PhD candidate in chemistry the title of their presentation is the Ura molecule from fertilizer to climate change is your urine contributing to global warming probably not but a chemical that makes up most of your urine might be this small molecule is called Ura Ura is a really nutritious fertilizer that we feed to the crops on our farms a
nd a lot of it we produce 180 million tons of it every year for human agriculture the more we use the more gets emitted into the atmosphere and yes it is found in human urine although it's probably not a major source for the atmosphere recent studies just in the past year or two show us that Ura is a really major player in the nitrogen cycle an important process that describes how ecosystems get their nutrients to support life it turns out Ura is a lot more important than we previously thought b
ut scientists don't know everything about how Ura moves around the globe so far we know that Ura leaves the atmosphere through two major ways one by getting sucked into raindrops and falling to the ground or two by sticking onto dust particles and getting carried off by the wind however the amounts of Ura that we detect in the atmosphere varies wildly and unpredictably over time and across regions this means that what we know about how Ura moves around the globe is incomplete there's something m
issing from our picture and that is where my work comes in I have found through chemical simulations in my lab work a new potential pathway for Ura that might help explain where it's going it turns out Ura can react with other chemicals in the atmosphere some of which come naturally from trees others from Human pollution to form dark particles that we call Brown carbon when a particle is Darkly colored it means that it absorbs more light and think about the last time that you wore a black shirt
on a sunny day did you get a little warmer than you expected more than if you're wearing a white shirt aerosol particles feel the same way for a long time scientists thought that most aerosol particles in the atmosphere were effectively white meaning they would reflect sunlight and lead to a cooling effect on the climate but Brown carbon absorbs sunlight trapping it as heat warming the climate and I found that Ura Brown carbon absorbs even more sunlight than previously studied Brown carbon which
would lead to an even greater warming effect on the climate compared to our theoretical models already ultimately my research has shown that UA can be chemically transformed in atmospheric aerosol into Brown carbon this should be able to help us explain those variances we detect in the amounts of Ura all around the globe as well as provide information about our warming climate thank [Applause] you thank you Zach so Zach like Alex and uh lyanna you enjoy hiking so what are some of your favorite
Trails um oh it's going to be so basic but usually the ones in Boulder I think are just so gorgeous and so convenient that's where I find myself usually uh I've gone on the enar trails the chiaka trails uh more times than I can count it's just nice to be able to get outside and look up and say wow I I'm out here this is cool yeah we're really really lucky to live here U like uh Simon and Alex you also enjoy reading outside of your academic work what are some titles that you've read recently that
you enjoy uh that's a great question um I recently was reading a series known as the bear toown series by a Swedish author named Frederick Bachman which is about a uh lovely small town that grapples with a lot of community issues that all small communities deal with like mob mentality and toxic masculinity and you know very relatable subjects um and it's lovely it's very lovely we're good so uh Zach used to be a ghost tour guide in colonial williamsberg Virginia and he would lead tours around a
t in the middle of the night and tell ghost stories now how in the world did you find this job that is a great question um when I was in college I did a lot of uh musical theater and Stage Theater and when you know that the people who they try to recruit to give middle of the night ghost story tours was college students who do theater um and I happened to fit that then diagram pretty well uh so I got recruited and I showed that I uh have a passion for storytelling and we were on our way so do yo
u have a short ghost story you can share with us even though it's not the middle of the night it's not the middle of the night and it has been several years since I've given it story um oh oh that's right on the spot um also I don't want to get sued by my former employers you guys didn't pay for the tour but there's a lot of excellent content go down to Colonial Williamsburg and uh go see right so I forgot that you I promise I I I forgot you probably did have to sign a non-disclosure agreement s
o Zach also likes to bake what if if uh assuming you have time tonight what are you going to go home and B muffins It's Time to make muffins my mom's muffin recipe and what kind of muffins chocolate chip butterscotch chip muffins okay I think we all know where we're going right after this Zach's house thank you Zach next up we have Georgia butcher PhD candidate in anthropology the title of her presentation is drone pilots and remote war and anthropolog anthropological investigation when one of m
y research subjects said for the first time she thought she got followed to work my ears perked up my ears perked up because my research subjects are a highly protected group of IND individuals who we rarely hear about but are very very protected in working on issues of our national security my research subjects are military drone pilots and in the early 2010s when the initial seeds of This research were being planted in my brain there were two predominant ideas about military drone Pilots the f
irst idea distributed largely by the Department of Defense was that drone Warfare saved money in American lives while keeping service members on us soil the second idea distributed largely in the media was the image of the PTSD ridden drone pilot who is using drugs and alcohol to cope with their job as an anthropologist I figured that while there may be some truth in both of these stories the lived reality for many was likely somewhere more in the middle and for the past five years I've conducte
d hundreds of hours of interviews and participant observation on bases around the US to answer the question what happens when service members participate in more remotely recently most of us became very aware of what it feels like to work remotely and while remote War isn't conducted from the living room of a service member it is only a car right away which significantly decreases the amount of time they have to transition from home to war and back again one of the most interesting findings that
has come out of this research project is that drone Personnel are doing things and developing habits that until this point Scholars had actually attributed to deployment itself this includes things like having a difficult time falling and staying asleep having a hard time connecting with friends and family and a hyper awareness or paranoia about their surroundings throughout interviews I was constantly reminded that Personnel are being trained to view the world through a post 911 lens and in th
is lens anyone including someone who looks like a civilian could be a Potential Threat so the service members are looking for these threats abroad while they're sitting in the US on these constantly rotating shifts and then at the end of that shift they have to go home and transition into mom or dad the constantly rotating shifts make it really difficult to maintain a healthy sleep schedule and the rapid transition from home to war and back again makes it really difficult ult to maintain healthy
and open relationships meanwhile their training has grounded into them this idea that anyone could be a Potential Threat even though they're not in the theater of war which generates this hyper awareness that is then layer on top of things like lack of sleep in in some Personnel in some cases this has actually turned into PTSD and substance abuse so while neither the dod nor the media were entirely wrong they were both still missing a big part of the story and that matters because when we think
about Personnel if we think of them either as non- deploying Personnel who are home safe or as PTSD ritten on alcoholics we're going to miss all those lived experiences in between so by taking a more nuanced approach to studying drone Warfare and Contemporary Service in the military we can better anticipate the needs and care of future service members before their diagnoses hit these extremes thank you thank you Georgia so prior to coming to graduate school at CU Boulder you worked in science a
nd technology policy in Washington DC I did so uh could you described that work and what got you into that line yeah I was actually very lucky in that right when I was a senior you know trying to figure out what I was doing with my life um I had someone basically say you know there's this really cool job opportunity Fellowship it's just two years kind of get your feet wet in the Science and Tech world you can figure out if you like living in DC um um and I applied and got the job and it was this
amazing opportunity for someone straight out of college to then interact with phds and work on really interesting projects for the White House or other federal agencies on whatever their uh science policy interests were at the time yeah it was a blast so do you see yourself moving back to DC potentially see we'll see and just a uh side plug uh CU has a fabulous program for undergraduates uh CU in DC which is an internship program where they can uh work and study in DC for a semester so little b
lr yeah it's very cool uh like Sima and Zach you enjoy reading outside of your academic work what are some recent titles you've enjoyed this feels like I'm really bu I'm anyone else in here a qut of thorns and Roses I feel like it's the only thing I can digest right now when I finished writing for the day it's all good no judgment yeah yeah I'm not going to summarize it okay that's all right that's all right now uh as you've heard lyanna and uh Alex are big proponents of pizza you on the other h
and wrote that your favorite food is a good cheeseburger yes so please to find for us in your world what is a good cheeseburger that's that feels like a loaded question because I don't really discriminate I just love when you have a good burger to bun to cheese to tomato lettuce ratio too much bread is just it's hard it's hard that for me is you know white flour wheat flour I prefer white toasted with a little butter there we go there we go okay so uh if we we're going to have the food Wars of p
izza versus cheeseburger how do you stack the deck I just I mean it was said in a presentation earlier you can't place a good she's so and we'll leave it there and seen thank you Georgia thank you next up we have Leopold biken the title of uh a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering the title of his presentation is flight by field most of us have been on an airplane at some stage in our lives and some of us have had the uncomfortable experience of turbulence during flight if you had a window se
at you may have seen the wings noticeably bending while the plane was bouncing around although very alarming this is expected Behavior and the aircraft's been designed to flex according to the forces generated by air flow over the wings I'm a control engineer and on aircraft we're responsible for implementing the sensors and Al gmss that help the plane maintain stable flight we typically don't like it when things flex and often make the assumption that the entire plane is one rigid structure and
we're usually quite rigid about that rigid assumption no bending no vibration no scaring passengers but in my research we tried to be a little more flexible about control design I performed experiments on a remote control aircraft where I measured the way the wings Flex during during flight to understand what information can be extracted from the bending patterns of the Wings since both Wing Bend and turbulence are caused by unsteady air in the atmosphere we hypothesize that by measuring the wa
y the wings Bend we could uncover the atmosphere silent forces acting on the aircraft although simple this idea is very different to traditional fly control algorithms that typically have a time delay in detection of unsteady aircraft behavior before taking corrective action with our method we can measure Wing deformations in real time before unsteady air has had the opportunity to impact flight allowing us to correct for turbulence much more effectively we sometimes think of this as a fly by fe
el approach where the aircraft can feel the wind now I can't take all the credit for this concept because this is exactly the way that small insects fly they're able to instantaneously infer information about The Wind by feeling the way that their wings flakes during flight in our experiments we have shown that Wing bending data contains critical information for stable flight including some parameters that we just can't measure with conventional systems the next step is to use this information t
o inform control algorithms that improve flight performance ultimately this unorthodox approach could be applied to any form of aircraft from the remote control plane I'm testing on all the way to high performance fighter jets and this technology will not only make flying smoother but also safer so maybe next time you see the wings of your airplane bending maybe you should thank them for keeping you safe instead of worrying about them snapping off thank you thank you Leopold I will try to rememb
er that because I'll actually be in a plane tomorrow so I'll look out and go it's okay it's okay so just to continue the food War theme that we have going on your favorite food is grilled ham and cheese so what kind of bread what kind of ham what kind of cheese so I'll start off this question by saying that this is probably a meal that I've had 50% of the meals in my life this got me through undergrad I'm not too picky uh it's more about the ratio similar to what Georgia said um with the burger
earlier um I think a good sourdough nicely buttered so it Browns nicely that's perfect um and then in terms of cheese normally just a good maybe a sharp chater maybe a medium chater something like that all right so uh pizza versus cheeseburger versus grilled ham and cheese that's a tough one because I do love pizza but I think I'm going to go with ham and cheese it's just you know frequency thing you know well if it got you 50% of the way through underground yeah let's let's stick with the winne
r uh so outside of your academic work you enjoy woodworking how how did you discover that Hobby and what do you carve I don't carve things I I make them I make furniture and things like that from scratch um I'm a mechanical engineer but I haven't built too many things which is quite embarrassing so that's that's very similar with my wife so that's a hobby we've picked up in the last few years um our first big project is we built a really nice corner bookshelf for our living room so it fits perfe
ctly in the corner right next to the window it Loops over the TV it just sits there really nicely it's got LED inlays so it lights up and it lights up everything on the bookshelf um so that was our first big project and probably the one I'm most proud of well you should not feel ashamed anymore about being mean mechanical engineer you do build things now uh so Leopold has a story that I can't wait to hear a dog chased me out of France once great question I knew you'd ask this um so I was on vaca
tion few years ago spring break with my girlfriend wife right now and her dad and we were in Spain Madrid went to Barcelona went up the coast all the way all the way to France just about there's a small town called called Port bow and we thought okay we'll go on a hike we're hiking people we're from Colorado and we thought let's see if we can hike into France while we're here and we hiked for about 3 hours got very lost and then eventually found our way and this road was Meandering not a very to
ugh hike and there's a herd of goats and that seems fine and suddenly this guard dog appears and is barking and is chasing faing us it gets about 20 ft away we're in the middle of nowhere Spain it gets 20 ft away it's growling its teeth are showing it's angry at us it wants us away so we just slowly backed up trying to pick up sharp rocks or anything that might help us and at some point it was following following following it stopped and we just kept going very slowly and that was the end of our
hiking for the day we found a bar and had a few be as so you backed up Al to France yep I'm so glad you got out alive thank you Leopold thank you next up we have Emma St Lawrence PhD candidate in media studies the title of their presentation is to seek newer worlds mediating reality in a time of plague I'm going to ask you all a question and I need you to answer honestly show of hands how many of you recognize this blonde bombshell in the center all right that's about what I thought and you're
all in very good company because over a period of just 10 days in March 2020 over 34 million Americans stream Tiger King on Netflix it was part of an almost 20% jump in streaming activity just from March to April of that year and this one show became a phenomenon less because of what it was than when it was this was the start of Sayad home orders the moment in which the pandemic became real for many of us locked in our homes and uncertain of our futures we clung to consolation anywhere we could
find it and for me and 34 million of my closest friends that included the world of Joe Exotic as well as thousands of other stories we watched listened to and read as a media scholar my work is all about how we use stories not just as entertainment or Escape but as transformative tools through which we can process emotion explore new ways of being and grapple with these seismic shifts in our reality and after three years of interviews digital ethnography and media analysis this one truth remains
when it comes to making sense of a senseless World stories can be our most powerful tools because when we engage with narrative media we open a door beyond the boundaries of our own lives and in the mediated space beyond we can find promise and possibility experiences so powerful they Echo into the physical realm recent discoveries around mirror neurons show that our bodies react to Media as if we were physically living it take a hug for example whether reading a description on a page or watchi
ng it play out on screen neurons in our brain light up exactly as if we were being embraced ourselves and this effect isn't limited to physical sensation but emotions and attitudes all materialized in our own bodies the more we know about this the harder it becomes to draw a strict line between the stories that we live and the physical realities we dwell in they're entangled in our very selves that's why in a pandemic Media Matters in my work I show that in times of turmoil we can strategically
seek out stories that will serve as proxies for things we long for but lack within our own lives whether that's the Grand Adventure of high fantasy the comfort of a beloved character or just a place where we can imagine what our lives should look like in the wake of what we've lost each of us should feel empowered to mind meaning from media and rewrite our own stories in the process in the end what matters is not the objective or physical reality of these media worlds but the Varity of the exper
ience and the power of these stories wild and wonderful and Joe Exotic as they may be to remind us how to live even in the darkest of our times thank you thank you Emma how's it going bud it's going good so outside of your academic work you said that you're starting to get back into dancing and fencing so what kind of dancing what kind of fencing uh modern dance mostly I love an opportunity to just go a little bit crazy in my bedroom so that works uh and historical fencing actually so German lon
g sword uh Italian Raper and saber uh pole arms if you will all the standard stuff so I don't know if you're aware but back in the 16th 17th century fencing and dancing Masters were the same person interesting because they were related skills there we go so so you might think about combining your modern dance interest with a little fencing action there were the whirling dervishes they would dance with swords so you know there you go there you go if Academia doesn't work out I mean there's always
watch out for the sword um now we did not have a chance to talk to Sima about her favorite foods but it is pomegranates which happens to be your favorite food so what is it about pomegranates that is your makes it your favorite food a little bit it's because no one else really likes them CU they're such a pain that's true soul mates but they're such a pain to open but I love it and they're great as a weapon if you're in a pinch great mythological ties it's really do it at all for who knew I nev
er looked at a pomr and went oh it's a weapon and a food group that is kind of how I view the world in terms of what can I eat what can I fight okay all right well I I think we'd all agree part of the I think joy of the pomegranate it is work to get it and therefore we enjoy it more because we had to work for it so Emma has another great uh opening line to a story a monkey stole my ice cream once when I was a kid kid this is true uh are you familiar with jalter Big Cliff lots of monkeys monkeys
with no fear of man and murder in their eyes uh and one saw me with my ice cream screamed as it leaped off a cliff ran out my legs stole it and I've been traumatized ever since so uh not a fan of monkeys apes or primates in general I think we're going to stick to the pomegranates uh so I understand that you are also getting back into knitting I am I'm not very good though that's okay so what what have you knitted so far um I'm trying to figure out how to make chain mail with knitting needles so
if anybody out there has any helpful TS Emma's right here I I figure there's got to be way get some like nice flexy wire make it happen yeah there's got to be a way um so uh well in addition to chain mail anything else you want to knit m a suit like a nice three-piece suit would be dope for my defense that would be dope mhm so when is your defense uh currently April Fool's Day which uh that's really soon to knit a suit we'll see It'll be lots of long nights watching TV well you said you're also
learning to draw so maybe just a hint maybe just draw the suit for the defense then make the suit after fair enough how's that thank you I respect your restraint thank you so much [Applause] next up we have Spencer Ziggler PhD candidate in geological Sciences the title of their presentation is the missing pages of Earth history 500 million years ago Northern Canada was under an ocean today it is a frozen Barren landscape we don't really know what's happened in the intervening 500 million years t
hat's almost 10% of Earth's history and you might be wondering how can we know so little about such a vast span of time well in geology sedimentary rock layers are the record keepers of events if those layers are still on the surface then we can read them like the pages in a book to work out what sort of events have occurred here in the past unfortunately the book of Northern Canada is missing a lot of pages the layers recording the events of the past 500 million years got eroded removed by wind
water and ice leaving behind no record of what events occurred there it's my intention to fill those missing pages but those missing Rock layers present a pretty big problem for me I need to know what rocks were there to work out what events occurred here in the past so how exactly do I read the book of Northern Canada when the pages are missing I use Ancient volcanoes called Kimber lights that a lot of people care about because they contain diamonds but I care about them because hundreds of th
ese kimberl lights have erupted throughout geologic time meaning that they've erupted through different thicknesses of rock layers at different times and despite the fact that the sedimentary layers are long gone the remnants of these kimberl lights are still on the surface so I take Rock from many different kimberlites and I pick out single crystals of a mineral called appetite appetite contains radioactive elements like uranium that transform into helium over time helium is a gas and it wants
to escape the appetite Crystal but whether or not it can escape depends on how much Rock buried the kimberlite after it erupted so by measuring the amount of uranium and helium in an appetite Crystal I can tell when my Kimber lights were buried deep beneath Rock layers and when they were at the surface the book of Northern Canada was missing a lot of pages but because of my research those pages aren't missing anymore so let me tell you the story We Begin over 500 million years ago with Northern
Canada under an ocean and buried by over a mile and a half of sedimentary rock then the vast majority of that rock got eroded away a few million years later the surface got buried again this time by about a half mile air of rock and finally massive glaciers scraped away the remaining Rock layers and left us with that Barren landscape and all those missing pages so what have I done through kimberl lights and appetites I filled in those missing pages of Earth history thanks thank you Spencer cours
e thank you for that so outside of your academic work uh like Emma I know you enjoy knitting I do so what do you enjoy knitting oh man I only like to knit scarves I just love a rectangle what can I say I sit there and knit the same thing well so maybe when Once Emma drafts her or their three-piece suit uh if we can figure out how it's all rectangles maybe you can contribute to the three-piece suit I got you there we go got you covered um so I understand that you do a lot of volunteer work for sa
fer streets better Broomfield I do could you describe that for us yeah so safer streets better Brimfield is a local nonprofit organization that works to increase like pedestrian safety uh biker safety if you wheel if you roll if you're pretty much anything but a car we you've got your back so um one of the volunteer events that I'm doing actually on Friday is winter Bike To Work Day for all you crazies out there who are going to be biking at work like me um we'll be at the us36 in Broomfield um
bus station giving out coffee and burritos and encouraging people to get outside and enjoy the commute well I think it's supposed to be kind of nice on Friday isn't it I haven't even checked because it's going to happen no matter what it's going to happen anyway exactly got it got it so I understand that uh you challenge yourself and others to also shop with just with your bicycle so how do you plan ahead so that you don't buy too much that won't fit in your basket um I just carry a lot of bags
with me I'm not sure that I'm very good at planning um but when I bike to Costco there truly is only so much I can buy so that one's pretty easy yeah now you do have to draw the line it's like I cannot put that on my bicycle well never say can't oh maybe it's not super safe okay all right all right I'll let you go with that now you noted that your favorite food is the sweet potato so assuming that there might be a pile of sweet potatoes when you get home today what might you do with them I buy t
hem at Costco just for the record um so there's a pile um you know what I don't know what I'll do with them tonight it's always an adventure I'm a big fan of my countertop air fryer just gets them all like crispy on the outside and soft on the ins it's biting into heaven all right you heard it here first U so I understand that you like podcasts are there any titles that are uh happening for you today um you know I've actually sort of blown through all the ones that I really wanted to listen to b
ut um I can highly recommend listening to Bone Valley um it was really good it's one of those like false imprisonment imprison oh wrongful conviction I don't know why I'm really into those but so true stories or not no very true and very sad sorry okay and then jigsaw puzzles what kind of jigsaw puzzles do you like to attack thousand piece or more that's it so do you look at the picture when you do the oh okay I'm only human my God but you also a graduate student that's totally fair no no someti
mes you're not human yeah true but now I look at the picture okay on that note thank you Spencer of course thank you next up we have akib Tes PhD candidate in computer science the title of his presentation is building trust and Reliance in human machine teams via transparent algorithms imagine your self-driving car takes unexpected long detour your normal reaction can range from confusion to frustration depending upon how your day is going now what if the car explains that there's an accident ah
ead and it's trying to give you the best available path now understanding its reasoning you'd likely agree with it or if you know the area well enough you might override the suggestion with a better plan so this essentially does couple of things first it reveals how AI thinks second it empowers us as users to take control of the situation and decide when and how much we want to be dependent on these Technologies you can extend this Dynamic to any of an application where we will potentially deplo
y Ai and robots such as search and rescue Warehouse logistic or even social media where AI recommends which videos to watch so therefore my research looks into how we can enable these Technologies to explain the reasoning back to us such that we can appropriately trust and rely on them this is extremely challenging because most of the modern algorithms that are deployed in these Technologies are opaque in reasoning even to the expert who designed them that is we do not know how these robots make
decision or when they would fail and when we are working with people they bring these psychological Tendencies and biases with them for example in one of our studies we had people playing this collab ative game with a robot and what we found that people often ignore robot suggestion when when they are confident about their own solution this happened even after we told them that the robot is an expert and there to help them we even went as far as to put a smile on the robot to make it more frien
dlier but when robot explained its reasoning people listened and they were able to complete the game successfully in another separate study with the Drone guided navigation people were not confident about themselves so so they started to over trust the Drone initially but when we showed the drone's reasoning visually they started to critically evaluate its suggestion and made independent CH uh decisions when they doubted its suggestion so the major takeaway here is explanations build trust and l
eads to better teamwork going forward we know that people are prone to misusing these Technologies which is going to become even more prominent with Technologies like Chad GPT powering more and more my research makes these technology more understandable and transparent for the people in the future we don't want people to be beholden to these systems we want the future where these machines Empower people and bring out the best of both humans and machines thank you thank you a so like Emma you enj
oyed dancing yes and I understand primarily swing dancing is salsa yes so I'm pretty good at swing dancing I am learning Sals and bachata right now I'm also in like cu's Roa team hopefully performing for iest let's see excellent and so where do you go to cut a rug what do you mean by that oh where do you where do you go to practice your dancing so generally like we have a CU swing club here but Mercury Cafe and den is really good when it comes to jazz music they have live music every Sunday so i
t's really fun I have like few friends here who come with me also with Dan so on Sundays we could find you there yes yes most of the times excellent uh before coming to Boulder for graduate school I understood understand that you had the opportunity to be a social fellow in the juuva Perma uh y yatra program so please describe for us this one week uh bus tour in the Himalayas so yes so this was an incredible experience so I was chosen to travel around to visit some local Villages and these local
Villages have these unsung heroes who are basically trying to do cool engineering work which should not be heard of and trying to help out the people like there is a school just for underprivileged people childrens and they're just making so Innovative curriculum for them which I never had when I was growing up even though I was from like Suburban City so that was like a really cool experience I get to tour around lot of different cities see meet these people who are working on the ground and l
earn from them and see how difference they're making excellent that's yeah sounds like an amazing program uh like Zach Alex and lyanna you enjoy hiking what are your go-to hikes yeah so when I'm stressed generally be Peck uh but generally yeah so I like likeed a winter hike so mostly like quri Peak or like B start those are my winter hikes and recently I did Seven Sisters in UK which was also really good excellent that sounds great uh you wrote that your favorite food is Halen yes so please desc
ribe Helen for folks in the room who may not know this dish yeah that's going to be difficult so it's something which is made during Ramadan by my mother so it's like um very home lers it's like a stew which is mixed with meat and barley wheat and everything slowly cooked for like overnight and it's the main thing behind it is like it is served during the Ramadan at the end of your fast so it's more about people coming together and eating it together so that's the reason it's like one of my favo
rite food and it's also very comfort food oh excellent sounds amazing so I understand you enjoy watching movies yes a lot are there some titles that you have particularly enjoy lately [Music] H French dispatch although it's a little bit too puy but no judgment yeah other than that trying to oh yeah I was introducing my roommate to a little bit of Chinese martial art movies so I've shown him some Jackie chin movies and yep man yep anything else anything else um ERS are coming up I haven't keeping
track of that that's okay you're a graduate student you're you get a pass cool thank you so much thank you let's give a huge Bolder Round of Applause for our 10 amazing contestant I don't envy anyone trying to make a decision I I thought they were all just amazing while our judges do make their decision please vote for The People's Choice Award uh the QR code is here for those of you watching online it should be in the on the chat uh feature this will be available for the next 10 minutes uh so
uh please vote now this is not Louisiana please vote only once it's okay I'm from Texas it's just a thing uh thank you so much for your your attendance uh in a couple of minutes that that magic wall will disappear and there will be food and beverage behind the wall so please grab an appetizer some sparkling cider while we take a short 15minute break thank you all so much for being here and once again another big round of applause for our 10 amazing contestants de friends we are back uh there's p
lenty of food and beverage so please help yourselves uh but in a couple of moments we will give the names of the winners uh as you heard earlier from Dean Adler The Graduate School currently has 6,000 graduate students so if you multipli the genius of the 10 presenters that you heard today time 545 that equals 6,000 incredibly talented human beings that we count as The Graduate students of the University of Colorado so let's give a round of applause for that 6,000 remember our winner today will
receive uh $1,500 and the opportunity to represent CU Boulder in this year's Regional competition our runnerup today will receive $750 and the People's Choice winner will receive $500 it is now my honor to welcome back DEA The Graduate School Scott Adler and we will start with drum roll please everyone The People's Choice Award winner is toib tahib T now come on [Music] [Applause] up in addition to all you wonderful uh folks here we had over 400 people this afternoon who watched online so thank
you all for supporting Graduate Studies at CU our second place winner today drum roll please Spencer [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Ziggler and the winner of the 2024 University of Colorado 3mt competition winner today is Zack uh [Applause] [Music] shefman all right well what spectacular presentations um congratulations to all of our winners um everyone here did an exceptional job uh thank you to our amazing competitors I want to thank our incredible judges for making the time and and off
ering their expertise today um and of course to the audience to everyone here uh who who uh came and saw these incredible presentations um finally I also want to thank one other person Haley Herman where's Haley oh there she is Haley has done an incredible job with this um from start to finish she really three minute thesis is is Haley uh and all the work she puts into this so um just a great job Haley and and of course I want to thank the rest of the graduate school staff for for helping Haley
in doing such an amazing job today so thank you all to everyone um feel free to uh have more food stay as long as you want well as long as the uh UMC staff will allow us and um I want to thank you for our seventh annual three minute thesis competition thanks [Applause] everyone all
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