JOHNSON CITY – Master’s degree student Joseph Headrick won East Tennessee State University’s recent 2022 3 Minute Thesis (3MT®) Competition with a presentation on “Salicylic Acid Inhibits Desiccation Survival of Salmonella Typhimurium.”
This competition, created at the University of Queensland, Australia, provides graduate students the opportunity to develop professional presentation and research communication skills. Participants condense complex research projects into engaging, three-minute presentations designed for a general audience using just one slide. Audience members learn what students in master’s and doctoral programs are studying and gain insight into the future of research, design and innovation in a variety of disciplines.
Headrick, from Maryville, Tennessee, is a master’s degree student in Biology.
“My research involves finding new potential treatments we can use to combat antibiotic resistance in Salmonella by using signaling pathways, since bacteria must communicate to each other somehow. The research group hypothesizes that disrupting these signaling pathways could trick the bacteria into ‘thinking’ they are in an environment that is more suitable to them than what they really are in,” he says.
Headrick, a first-generation college student, was eager to showcase his research. “3MT® was a competition I wanted to join, because I believe that effective scientific communication is key to addressing many issues we face as a society,” he says.
Second place in the ETSU competition went to Savannah Bennett, whose thesis is titled “Susannah and Cold Mountain: Examining the Portrayal of Appalachian Culture in Opera.” Her research examined the prevalence of stereotypes in society, particularly in forms of entertainment. “As a classically trained musician, my thesis topic explores the intersections of western art music and Appalachian culture. After studying the presence of Appalachian stereotypes in entertainment mediums such as literature, television, and film, I began to question whether such stereotypes are also present in the dramatic arts.”
Bennett, who is currently a master’s degree student in the ETSU Department of Appalachian Studies, is an out-of-state student from North Carolina and was recently hired to serve as the collections manager at the Reece Museum.
Alexis Moser received the People’s Choice Award, voted on by viewers. Her thesis is “Speech-Language Pathologists’ Perceptions of the Severity of Speech Sound Disorder.” In her research, Moser says she aims “to help set a future standard of holistic assessment practices for speech-language pathologists when determining the severity of speech sound disorder among children.”
Moser says her research reveals that “there currently is no standard for how speech language pathologists determine speech sound disorder severity. This means one speech language pathologist might say a child's speech sound disorder is mild, while another might consider it moderate or even severe. It is also unknown whether they only consider the number of sounds the child produces correctly or if they also consider the child's communicative participation, social-emotional wellbeing, and how the child views their own speech.” Additionally, Moser is currently surveying pediatric speech language pathologists across the United States to determine how assessment tools, such as the International Classification of Functioning developed by the World Health Organization (2001), are being used. After graduating from Western Carolina University with an undergraduate degree in Communication Sciences, Moser – a first-generation college student from North Carolina - is pursuing a master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology.
This is the fifth year ETSU has participated in this international competition, and the participating students gave their presentations in-person in the Martha Street Auditorium in the D.P Culp Student Center. By winning top honors in ETSU’s 3MT® event, Headrick will represent ETSU in the Southern Regional Competition during the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools’2023 Annual Meeting in March.
A $1,100 scholarship was awarded for the first-place winner, and a $750 scholarship will go to both the second place and people’s choice recipients.