Carleton’s 2025 Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition Winners!

Carleton University held its annual Three Minute Thesis Competition on March 27, 2025. Two rounds of competition were held earlier in the day before eight finalists competed for the top prizes in the late afternoon. Contest prizes up for grabs by grad students consisted of one first-place prize of $500, one second-place prize of $300, one third-place prize of $200 and honourable mention.

The 2025 winners from Carleton are:

First Place: Geneviève Haché, Chemistry. “Out of the non-stick pan, into our waters: PFAS and their foothold in the Great Lakes’ aquatic life cycles.” Watch the winning presentation below:

Second Place: Raegan Davis, Biology. “Dam it, I’m stranded: quantifying fish stranding downstream of hydropeaking facilities.” Watch the video here.

Third Place: Tejas Kokatnur, Building Engineering. “Why pay for cooling when you can stay cool for free? Exploring passive strategies in low-income housing.” Watch the video here.

Honourable Mention: Dunja Palic, Management. “Making sense of qualified immigrants’ career transitions: The role of context, time, and resourcefulness.” Watch the video here.

2025 Carleton 3MT Winners: Honourable Mention winner Dunja Palic, First Place winner Geneviève Haché, Third Place winner Tejas Kokatnur and Second Place winner Raegan Davis.

Founded by the University of Queensland in Australia, 3MT celebrates graduate student research and takes place at universities around the world. Participants have to summarize their research in no more than 180 seconds. The judges for this year’s competition were:

Nathalie Laporte, Executive Director, Canadian Association of University Business Officers, Board of Governors, Carleton University
John Nelson, Director, Innovation Hub, Carleton University
Virginia Taylor, Treasurer, Tanzania Education and Micro-Business Opportunity

Finals Judges: Nathalie Laporte, Virginia Taylor and John Nelson

The finalists’ presentations are available on our Graduate Studies’ YouTube channel. In addition to the above-mentioned prize winners, the finalists included:

Isaac Finkelstein (Biology): Can closely related damselfly species tell each other apart?

Jennice Hinds (Linguistics): Beyond words: The unspoken meaning in sounds.

Irbaz Rehman (Chemical and Environmental Toxicology): Nature’s secret treasure trove, endophytes.

Hannah Villeneuve (Building Engineering): Make yourself at home, indoor environmental conditions for aging in place.