Beyond the Clock: Highlighting Four 3MT Finalists
By: M. Caroline Helms and Sandra Spiroff
The annual Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition brings together graduate students to present their research topics, or “theses,” in a concise three-minute window, supported by a single fixed slide. The competition challenges students to think critically about the most crucial aspects of their study and effectively communicate their topic to the panel of judges. Despite its challenges, the competition is a significant learning experience for all contestants, as it develops a crucial skill set—a kind of ultimate elevator pitch.
This year’s final 3MT round featured 24 finalists, selected from a field of more than 90 competitors. The finalists delivered captivating presentations about their specific research topics and studies, tailored for a general audience, vying to earn the opportunity to compete in a regional round in Greenville, SC, at the next Conference of Southern Graduate Schools (CSGS) meeting. Among the finalists were four doctoral students: Derek Henrichs, Sabrina Perry, Xinyue Gong, and Abhishesh Bajracharya.
Derek Henrichs
Derek Henrichs is a doctoral student in accountancy from South Carolina. His research delves into the power dynamic between a CEO and a CFO, specifically how that dynamic affects a company’s profit. Henrichs has always been interested in the role of the CFO, who is the leader of the accounting and finance functions of business.
“I measure power in this relationship in several ways: salary, stock ownership, tenure, achievements, awards, board memberships, and social network connections… Understanding the role of power differences between the CEO and CFO and how these two executives affect each other — and thus, a firm’s profits — is becoming increasingly important because the positional power of the CFO has increased in the last five years more than any other position,” Henrichs explained.
His research aims to provide boards of directors and hiring committees with a better selection tool for extending power. Henrichs hopes to be a tenure-track professor at an “R1” research university, like the University of Mississippi, and to continue exploring the impact of accounting and financial employees on companies.
Sabrina Perry
Sabrina Perry, a computer science and engineering doctoral student from Camden, Arkansas, focuses on understanding malicious attacks that manipulate machine learning models. She has always had concerns about the security of machine learning models and the potential vulnerabilities and poisoning attacks they face. She emphasizes the importance of defenses against these attacks to ensure the safety and reliability of technology like self-driving cars and online security.
“…just like how people can be tricked or manipulated, malicious attacks can fool these models. Imagine someone sneaking misleading information into a teacher’s lesson plan to confuse students, [which is] similar to what happens in machine learning. We call it ‘data poisoning attacks.’ These attackers manipulate the information the model learns from, so it does not work correctly,” Perry said.
She expressed the importance of having a defense against these attacks so that “the technology we rely on, like self-driving cars and online security, stays safe and reliable,” Perry said.
After graduation, Perry envisions a future in academia or returning to the tech industry.
Xinyue Gong
Xinyue Gong is a doctoral student in physics from China. Her research centers around new shift phenomena in vortex sound waves. The application of this research is visible in operations such as communications, manipulating particles, ultrasound imaging, and drug delivery.
Gong is passionate about research in acoustics because “they are useful for everyday life,” she says. Gong plans to become a professor after she completes her degree.
Abhishesh Bajracharya
Abhishesh Bajracharya, who hails from Lalitpur, Nepal, is a biological sciences doctoral student. His research aims to gain insights into how plants regulate temperature responses at the molecular level, which might lead to new ideas for making plants temperature-resilient in this age of climate change.
In simpler terms, he explains that living organisms host a library of genes that are used to produce proteins. Ranging anywhere from “digestion of glucose to disease resistance, these proteins help to regulate all the processes that occur within living organisms,” Bajracharya said. Transcription is then the first step in producing these proteins.
“In large-scale responses, these types of transcripts produced are reprogrammed to fit the needs of the organism. I am using plant temperature response as a model to study the intricacies of how this transcriptional reprogramming occurs. Plants are very sensitive to temperature changes, and a small increase in temperature can cause a decrease in crop yields,” he said.
Bajracharya hopes to establish a molecular biology research program in Nepal while continuing his research on molecular biology and temperature resilience in plants.
These 3MT finalists provide a glimpse of the extensive and varied research endeavors the graduate students across our campus pursue during their studies. The Graduate School extends gratitude to all 2023 3MT competitors and eagerly anticipates witnessing the bright futures awaiting them and all UM graduate students.