Crimes against spaghetti and other three minute tales win over judges
21 June 2023
From the serious - the devastating impacts of forced marriage of children - to the quirky - the “hero-to-villain arc of cane toads” - this week's Monash Business School Three Minute Thesis heat heard it all.
With nine contestants, the annual PhD showcase was one of our largest ever. Every entrant pulled off an amazing feat – condensing years of academic blood, sweat and tears down to compelling three-minute presentations.
3MT faculty winner Mario Lecci.
In the end, Economics PhD candidate Marco Lecci (pictured) secured his place in the upcoming Monash University 3MT finals with We are what we eat, his passionate account of the economic and further-ranging effects of food.
The 3MT is an academic research communication competition celebrating the exciting research of PhD students in Australia and globally. Each candidate is permitted one slide to accompany their talk, and anyone exceeding three minutes would be disqualified.
Presenting via Zoom, Italian-born Mr Lecci opened his speech by recalling his shock when his Irish girlfriend deliberately snapped uncooked spaghetti before throwing it in the pot. “Breaking spaghetti is considered a crime against Italian cuisine,” he said.
Mr Lecci is for the first time quantifying how food preparation has driven profound cultural change, by analysing cookbooks and recipes dating back to 1200 AD. “Why are food and culinary traditions so important to different cultures? (Because) food holds the power to shape history and transform society,” he said.
Judges Professor Pitosh Heyden and Professor Huu Duong said Mr Lecci “stood out in terms of compelling storytelling, novel conceptualisation and creative methodological approach”.
“The candidate puts forward a fascinating and novel way of looking at how cultural identity is encoded and diffused across eras and regions,” they said in their remarks.
Another creative cooking analogy saw Cynthia Huang of the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics (EBS) claim runner-up honours for her presentation New principles and methods for complex data preparation and integration.
“Cooking and data science are two of my favourite things,” she said. “Researchers in all fields are finding new ways to extract insights from novel types of data. I work on building tools and templates to make datasets more transparent and less tedious. In most cases a well-written recipe goes a long way.”
Adrianna Bella (Centre for Health Economics or CHE) won the People’s Choice Award with her passionate presentation on the consequences of child marriage, which affects 650 million women and girls worldwide, and her work studying the effects of the first minimum marriage age law in Indonesia: Marry me later: Does minimum marriage age help?
“Let’s take a moment to think back on our teenage years filled with hopes and dreams for our future. Providing a minimum age policy should be seen as a commitment to ensure every girl has the freedom to reach her dreams,” she said.
The competition overall showcased the impactful research topics being addressed, Profs Heyden and Duong said.
“Candidates bravely engaged with socially complex topics in dire need of impactful solutions -- from implications of global warming for worker productivity, to policies for increasing legal marriage age for women in developing countries, to novel methods for ensuring greater data transparency,” they said.
“It was invigorating to see the range of real-life issues tackled head-on by our PhD students.”
3MT faculty heat entrants with (centre) Associate Dean Graduate Research Matthew Hall.
The other 3MT entrants were:
Yuki (Zhengqi) Guo (Accounting): Speak the language of social media. The power of ‘crowd’ in the digital era. Ms Guo’s findings suggest organisations need to adapt to the culture and language of social media when communicating their KPIs. “As accounting professionals…to communicate with our stakeholders about performance is one of the most important things,” she said.
Thomas Plunkett (CHE): When the solution becomes the problem: Grabbing his audience’s attention by comparing the cane toad pest (introduced to kill insects destroying sugar cane crops) with the rise in use of antidepressants (accompanied by an increase in troubling side-effects), Mr Plunkett’s thesis studies show a 2006 Federal Government initiative to subsidise psychosocial treatments for mental health problems reduced reliance on drugs and subsequent side-effect complications.
Andrew Ireland (CHE): Heat and worker health: The temperature-verse. Mr Ireland’s findings investigate the causal relationship between temperature and worker safety, and how it’s changing over time. “My research is particularly important in the context of a warming climate,” he said.
Adam Akmal Dzulkipli (CHE): The kids are alright (in school): Schooling reduces maltreatment and associated harms. Mr Dzulkipli’s study is contributing new evidence to the determinants and consequences of child maltreatment, and potential policy interventions such as mandating children to stay at school longer to distance them from harmful behaviour. “As a society we owe it to our children to ensure they are protected,” Mr Dzulkipli said.
Giovanni Empel: (CHE): Doctors got style: Unwarranted variation in clinical practice. “What if I told you baristas and doctors are more similar than you realise? Doctors bring their own vivid style to medicine,” Mr Empel told the 3MT audience. His thesis analyses the causes and consequences of the range in physician practice styles, including “suboptimal health outcomes”.
H. Sherry Zhang (EBS): New tools for visualising and explaining multivariate spatio-temporal data. ”Indices are all around us, helping us make important decisions,” Ms Zhang said. As part of her research, Ms Zhang has created new open-source software to assist scientists in choosing and using complex indexes, which in turn enables policymakers to determine “when or if to take remedial action.”