Graduate School Announces Three-Minute Thesis Contest Winners

Graduate students spanning disciplines from civil engineering to counseling psychology distilled years of research down to a mere 180 seconds yesterday for the annual Three-Minute Thesis Competition sponsored by the Graduate School.

Colleges and schools held competitions during the first two weeks of March to produce the field for yesterday’s final campus round, held during Graduate Research Appreciation Day. Winners were able to succinctly explain the significance of their work to a non-specialist audience. They were:

Master’s and Pre-candidacy Doctoral Students

• Liang Liang (civil and environmental engineering): “Low-Impact Development Mixture Evaluation for Heavy Metal Removal”
• Stephanie Yee (counseling psychology): “Reentry Experiences of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women”
• Kyla Cools (anthropology), “Locating Disability and Disease in the Material Record”

Doctoral Candidates

• Fiona Jardine (information studies): “Breastfeeding Without Nursing: The Lived Experiences of Exclusive Pumpers”
• Amanda Burkholder (human development): “Is Economic Inequality Okay? Children’s Evaluations of the Wealth Gap”
• Suzanne Marselis (geographical sciences): “Predicting Tree Species Richness in the Tropics”

People’s Choice

• Master’s and pre-candidacy doctoral students: Liang Liang
• Doctoral candidates: Fiona Jardine

One of the winners among the doctoral candidates will be selected to represent the University of Maryland at the international Three-Minute Thesis Competition sponsored by Universitas 21. UMD has been highly successful in the international competition, winning the Judges’ First Place in 2014 and 2017, and the People’s Choice Awards in 2014, 2015 and 2017.