On Thursday, March 5, 2026, Harvard Griffin GSAS held its second annual Three Minute Thesis Competition (3MT) in Sever Hall 113, drawing an audience of enthusiastic community members from Harvard and beyond. Outside, ominous, gray clouds hovered low, threatening rain, but you would not have known it from the spirit inside. Ten speakers, chosen as finalists from across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM disciplines, had the task of presenting their research to a broad audience in just three minutes, using the aid of one static slide. All ten gave fascinating talks, ranging in scale and scope from the microscopic to the universal. Faced with the difficult task of evaluating the content, the presentation, and the slide according to 3MT guidelines, the judges selected three winners, each of whom was awarded prize money: in first place, Abigail Frey; in second, Sofia Edgar; and in third, Masoud Ariankhoo. While the judges were deliberating, the audience got to vote for their favorite talk for the Audience Choice Award, which went to Kai Krautter. The audience also had the opportunity to pose questions to our speakers in a lively Q&A that followed the event. Read below for a recap of the winning talks. For more on the history and rules of 3MT along with a full list of our participants, check out our website, and watch videos of all of our speakers delivering their talks on our YouTube channel.
Our first-place recipient, Abigail Frey (biological sciences in public health), delivered a presentation entitled “Uncovering the Unknown: Identifying Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis.” One in 25 cases of tuberculosis is drug resistant, which means that the standard treatment procedure will not work. In her research, Abigail screens for drug resistance mutations in the DNA of tuberculosis bacteria. Through computational work, she searched for unknown mutations and identified a new gene that when mutated is associated with an increased rate of treatment failure. In the lab, she was then able to isolate the pathogen and genetically engineer it with the mutations she had identified, thus allowing her to test it with different antibiotics. Knowing which pathogens are drug resistant will inform doctors how to best treat various types of TB infections. Her research ultimately facilitates turning treatment failures into treatment successes.
Sofia Edgar (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, materials science) took second place for her talk, titled “Just Right: Designing Better Batteries for a Renewable Future.” As we move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy, we face a storage issue. Aqueous organic redox flow batteries, which store energy in liquid electrolytes, present a promising solution. Porous electrodes determine how efficiently these batteries charge, but, as Edgar illustrated through the analogy of water running through tea leaves, the electrode fibers can be too dense or too sparse, impacting efficiency. To improve these batteries, Sofia and her collaborators designed a novel technique that uses fluorescence microscopy to see what’s happening inside the electrodes, and she also created custom 3D-printed versions of electrodes to test different structures. This research has yielded multiple critical insights already, paving the way for better batteries and a future that runs on renewable energy.
Masoud Ariankhoo (Near Eastern languages and civilizations) received the third-place award for his talk “How the Devil Defines Us: A Medieval Biography of Satan.” While today we have a fixed idea of the devil, medieval Islamic religious literature contained many different and often conflicting versions of Satan. Drawing from thousands of pages of primary source materials in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, Ariankhoo shows how medieval theologians used the figure of the devil to delineate the boundaries of their particular religious schools. These medieval theologians would argue that their rivals’ ideas were inspired by Satan, sometimes writing entire books on the subject. The devil, Ariankhoo argues, is an inverted projection of ourselves, made into the “ultimate personification of evil and the ‘other.’” This is the first study to explore the canonization of Satan in the Muslim context and opens up the possibility of comparative studies across Christian and Jewish representations of Satan.
Kai Krautter (organizational behavior) received the Audience Choice Award, as well as an honorable mention from the judges, for his talk, which posed the key question in the title: “Is More Passion Always Better?” Delivering his presentation with gusto, Krautter asked how many people in the audience believed they should be passionate about their work. Almost every hand went up. But, as Kai went on to describe, too much passion can be a bad thing, evident in the Latin root of passion or the translation in his native German––literally, the ability to suffer. To examine the impact of passion in a real environment, Krautter designed a survey that measured the passion of over 700 nurses at a local hospital. From the data, he was able to identify the point where passion became too high and work performance declined, as well as the critical consequences (e.g., nurses may have focused so much on certain patients that they neglected others). We all may face similar dilemmas, but, as Kai concluded, if we can recognize the point of diminishing returns, then we can manage the volatile winds of passion, rather than let the winds steer us.
As our first-place winner, Abigail Frey will go on to participate in the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools 3MT competition in April. (If you would like to learn more, you can read a thorough recap of Frey’s research and her experience participating in the event in an article published on the Harvard Griffin GSAS News page.) In the end, the event was a great success and reminded us once again not only of the wonderful research that graduate students are doing here at Harvard, but also of the difference they make in the world. Encouraged by the first two years of the 3MT Competition, we hope that the event becomes an annual tradition, offering to graduate students a unique platform to share their research, and to all of us the opportunity to learn about their amazing work. In the meantime, we look forward to continuing to support the research and communication efforts of all of our graduate students.
*Banner Photo: The 2026 Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition Finalists. / Photo by Tony Rinaldo
