2021 Doctoral College Showcase Winners Announced

Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Doctoral College Showcase Competitions for postgraduate researchers. There were three competitions in total which were all held online, and votes were received from across the University and beyond. The poster competition, 3-minute thesis competition and the image competition are a celebration of the contributions our postgraduate researchers make to their disciplines – and to wider society.

The winners, listed below, were announced by Professor Luke Windsor the Dean of the Doctoral College on Wednesday 19 May 2021. The recording of the awards ceremony is available to watch on the Doctoral College Showcase webpage.

It is a credit to our postgraduate researchers that they have excelled themselves in this year’s Doctoral College Showcase competitions under the difficult conditions imposed by a global crisis of the scale of COVID-19. Congratulations are due not just to our winners, but to all the entrants!

- Professor Luke Windsor, the Dean of the Doctoral College

For the poster competition, we received over 150 initial expressions of interest were followed by 92 abstracts, which were then narrowed down to the 24 finalists. For the 3-Minute Thesis and Image Competition, we received 58 entries in total. Across all three competitions, there were 2,061 visitors who voted - with many more visiting to just view and browse the entries and work of our postgraduate researchers. As always, the competitions were a wonderful showcase for the work that our postgraduate researchers are doing – which is still available to view online on our doctoral college competition pages.

Poster competition winners

For this competition our talented postgraduate researchers entered a poster, and – new for this year - a short 5-minute video to explain their research to a non-specialist audience. They also made a live online presentation to a panel of judges. The standard was very high, and the judges had a very difficult decision. After some deliberation, they awarded the following prizes, click on the links below to view the winners' entries (opens in Sway).

• 1st prize: Pablo González Suárez, Faculty of Biological Sciences
• 2nd prize: Johan A. Pasos, School of Civil Engineering
• 3rd prize: Laura Ball, School of Medicine
• The ‘Most Popular Poster’ prize, chosen by a public vote, went to Itsna Dinurriyah - School of Languages, Cultures, and Societies

Three-minute thesis competition winners

In the three-minute thesis competition, our postgraduate researchers explained their doctoral research work to a non-specialist audience in just three minutes. In a public vote, the favourite of our six finalists were chosen. Click on the links below to view the winners' entries (opens in YouTube).

• 1st prize:  Fran Morris  - School of Earth and Environment
• 2nd prize: Johanna Tomczak - School of Psychology
• 3rd prize: Pauline Oustric - School of Psychology
• The ‘Most Popular Three-minute Thesis’ prize, chosen by a public vote went to Lefteris Koutsoloukas - School of Civil Engineering

Image competition winners

The challenge for this competition was: ‘Can you explain the key point of your research with just one image and one short paragraph of explanation, to a non-specialist audience?’. From our 30 entrants, the top two in the public vote were our winners in this competition. Click on the links below to view the winners' entries.

• 1st prize: Nedaa Al Barwani - Faculty of Business
• 2nd prize: Francis Dent - School of Mechanical Engineering

Browse all the entries from the three competitions on our Leeds Doctoral College Showcase Competitions webpage.