Dorota Budzyn and Livia Ionescu have been awarded first place and runner up at the "Visualise Your Thesis 2021" competition, where PhD students were challenged to make a video explaining their research to non-specialist audience in under two minutes. Watch their videos here.

Dorota Budzyn, winner of the competition and awarded a prize of £1000, said:

It is great to see that as PhD students we are being encouraged to work on our communication skills. For me the workshops and provided materials were a good base to learn new ways of explaining research problems to wide audience. It definitely helped me to prepare my video. I think it is also going to help me to keep my future presentations more engaging which is not always easy with engineering topics.

Livia Ionescu, runner-up and awarded a prize of £250, said:

Explaining your own research is always a difficult thing to do, especially if the audience is non-specialist. Making this presentation has helped me to get to the core of my research and reminded me again of its importance. I am happy to have had this opportunity. I am positive that the skills I gained from following the workshops and creating the video will help me during my research career and my life – or at least it will help me a great deal the next time a family member asks me ‘what exactly it is that I am doing’.

Congratulations Dorota and Livia!


First published: 10 September 2021