We had a wonderful Wednesday evening celebrating graduate student research at our twelfth annual Three Minute Thesis Competition!
Dr. Jelena Komanchuk
To start off the night, Dr. Jelena Komanchuk, winner of the Michael Smith Health Research BC and UBC Okanagan Postdoctoral Fellowships, shared her talk “Sleep health inequities for children in foster and kinship care.” Using the tool Video Scribe, Dr. Komanchuk shared with us a different option for knowledge translation: animated videos.
Following Dr. Komanchuk’s video, we jumped right into competition mode with the Three Minute Thesis talks. Eleven students from across campus spent months perfecting their talks, and their hard work and dedication showed. It is no easy feat translating complicated research into language that we can all understand, but all of the competitors excelled at this challenging task!
At the end of the night, Sara Klick, master’s student and researcher in the Neuroplasticity, Imagery, and Motor Behaviour Laboratory at UBC Okanagan took home the top prize with her talk “Imagining Recovery: The brain’s response to motor imagery after stroke.” Sara used excellent metaphors to describe to us how the brain responds to visualizations of movement following a stroke.
The Three Minute Thesis runner-up was Nathan Adams, doctoral student and researcher in the SCI Action Canada Lab at UBC Okanagan. Nathan delivered a compelling presentation with his talk “Sitting is the New Smoking, but ‘If I Didn’t Sit Then I Would Probably be Dead Faster,’” which explained how people with spinal cord injuries do, or do not, identify with clickbait headings and how language around sedentary behaviour can be adjusted to be more inclusive of individuals with spinal cord injuries.
This year’s alumni UBC People’s Choice Award Winner Jiatao Zhong, from the Master of Science in Mathematics program, excited the crowd with his enthusiasm and passion for his research. In his talk “A Novel Image Segmentation Method,” Jiatao shared how image segmentation can be used to detect early signs of breast cancer and wildfires.
Overall, it was a fantastic night full of captivating presentations and exciting research! Thank you to the community members, students, faculty, and staff who came out to support this key graduate student event.
 Sara Klick and Dr. Peter Simpson |
 Nathan Adams and Judge Rick Cooper |
 Jiatao Zhong and Judge Dr. Joanne Taylor |
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.