Topics ranged from giving nanoparticles the aquatic skills of an Olympic swimmer so they can deliver anti-cancer drugs more effectively…to using game theory to help Sri Lankan farmers decide what crops to plant…to developing an ultrasonic Trojan horse to destroy tumors…to using blue light as an alternative to antibiotics in controlling bacterial infections.
The event was the finals of the fourth annual Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition held last Friday at the Student Life Center that pitted Vanderbilt graduate students against one another in an unusual test of communications skills: summarizing their 80,000-word doctoral theses in terms that members of the public can understand in less than three minutes with a single PowerPoint slide.
People’s Choice: Alice Leach in the interdisciplinary program in materials science used the Road Runner cartoon characters in her presentation, “A Little Goes a Long Way: Nanoparticles for Solar Energy Capture,” to explain why solar energy’s diffuse and intermittent nature make it difficult to harness despite its tremendous abundance – it is similar to the problem Wile E. Coyote has in trying to capture the Road Runner – and how nanotechnology (not made by the Acme Company, I trust) can substantially improve solar cell efficiency.