Samra Khan took top honours in the UWindsor Three Minute Thesis competition for her presentation on creating vaccines to target immune responses against cancer.
Science swept the 2024 University of Windsor Three Minute Thesis (3MT) research competition for graduate students on April 9.
The 3MT is a skills development activity which challenges graduate students to present their research and its wider impact to a non-specialist audience in just three minutes using only one slide.
This year, first, second, and third place all went to science students.
In first place was Samra Khan, a doctoral candidate from chemistry and biochemistry, with her presentation, “Sugar-coated cancer vaccines for ‘sweet’ adaptive oncoimmunology.”
“I use both experimental and computational synthetic organic chemistry to work in cancer drug discovery with my advisor, Dr. John Trant,” says Khan.
“I computationally design, and then make, chemical cancer vaccines and next generation cancer drugs. My goal is to both stop cancer developing in the first place while also providing new hope to those with advanced disease.”
Khan won $1,000 cash and will represent the University of Windsor at the provincial final to be held at the Lakehead University campus in Orillia on May 8.
With a cash prize of $500, Carly Demers from integrative biology took second place with her thesis, “Bug-Eat-Bug World: Assessing two Canadian Dicyphus species (Hemiptera: Miridae) for their potential as novel greenhouse biological control agents.”
Coming in third was Karla Alnajm from the Department of Biomedical Sciences with her talk “Unmasking Breast Cancer: How Removing One Protein Boosts Immunity.” She wins $250.
A videorecording of all the finalists is available on the graduate studies website.