A graduate student at Waterloo Engineering has taken top prize for the second straight year at the campus-wide Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition.
Haya Almutairi, who advanced to the University of Waterloo finals by winning a heat for civil and environmental engineering students, spent her 180 seconds in the spotlight Wednesday explaining her research into self-healing asphalt pavements.
Haya Almutairi (centre), a civil and environmental engineering PhD student, poses with supporters after winning the 3MT finals at the University of Waterloo.
Almutairi, a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Pavement and Transportation Technology, topped 14 other qualifiers at the Theatre of the Arts to claim $1,000 and the right to represent Waterloo at the Ontario finals.
She also took home the People’s Choice award as voted on by audience members. The runner-up was biology student Nilanth Yogadasan, who won $500.
Contestants in 3MT competitions have three minutes and one static slide to outline the breadth and significance of their research to a non-expert audience.
Three minutes and a single slide
The campus-wide winner in 2018 was Gregory Lui, a PhD student in chemical engineering who talked about his research using photocatalysts to convert wastewater from local breweries into electricity.
Lui went on to finish fifth at the provincial championships to book a spot at the national finals, where he came in an impressive second place and took home the People’s Choice award.
3MT began in Australia in 2008 and has grown into a world-wide event. The Ontario finals are scheduled for April 17 at McMaster University in Hamilton.
The other engineering qualifiers at the 2019 Waterloo contest were Andrew Lord (architecture), Robin Castonguay (architecture), Omar Ferwati (architecture), Madiha Khan (architecture), Kianna Amini (chemical engineering), Nitin Padmanabhan (electrical and computer engineering), David Murdoch (mechanical and mechatronics engineering) and Apurva Misra (systems design engineering).