Cherish Taylor Wins Three Minute Thesis Competition

By Nick Nobel
November 13, 2020
A woman wearing glasses and smiling.
Neuroscience Graduate Student Cherish Taylor.

Neuroscience graduate student Cherish Taylor took home the top prize in the Graduate School’s Three Minute Thesis competition. Taylor is a graduate student in the lab of Somshuvra Mukhopadhyay, M.B.B.S., Ph.D. in the College of Pharmacy’s Division of Pharmacology and Toxicology.

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is an academic competition that challenges master's and doctoral students to describe their research within three minutes to a general audience. Developed by The University of Queensland (UQ), the exercise cultivates students’ academic, presentation, and research communication skills. The competition supports their capacity to effectively explain their research in three minutes in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience.

The Graduate School collaborates with offices across campus to develop workshops to prepare you for a successful competition. This year, the competition was held virtually, with contestants pre-recording their three-minute presentations.

Taylor won first place for her presentation titled “SLC30A10 Protein: The Key to Discovering Treatments for Manganese-induced Parkinsonism.” She was also first author of a paper that earned Dr. Mukhopadhyay the 2020 Co-op Research Excellence Award for Best Paper.

The college had an excellent showing in this year’s 3MT competition. Of the ten finalists, four came from the College of Pharmacy, including Riyad Alzhrani and Rishi Thakkar from the Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery and Elham Heidari from the Health Outcomes Division.