Welcome back to another episode of Grad Pod and Happy Tuesday! In this episode of Grad Pod, I am joined by this year’s 3MT winner, Rasajna Madhusudhana, a third-year PhD candidate in the School of Pharmacy and first-place winner of VCU’s 3MT competition. Rasajna shares how she transformed 3 years of research on potential malaria treatments into a compelling three-minute story!
HAYA: There is a rare skill in being able to take years of research and translate it into 3 minutes. Not diluted, but distilled. The 3 minute thesis or 3MT is not just a competition. It is exercise and clarity. Creativity and courage. It challenges scholars to transform complexity into connection to make their work not only understood, but felt.
Every year, graduate students globally and across VCU rise to this challenge, sharing ideas that have the potential to change lives and advance discovery. It is an event that reminds us that research is not just about data, it is about storytelling purpose, and the impact behind the science. Welcome back to Grad Pod, the podcast where we spotlight the stories, research and voices shaping graduate education at VCU.
I am your host, Haya Hamid, and today I am joined by Rasajna Madhusudhana, who just started her third year as a PhD candidate at the School of Pharmacy. And she is also this year’s first-place winner of VCU’s 3MT, or 3 minute thesis competition. Her research explores Nicotinamidase inhibitors as potential treatment for malaria, a project that bridges medicinal chemistry, global health, and innovative drug discovery.
Through her work, she exemplifies what 3MT is all about turning rigorous points, science and jargon into a story that inspires curiosity, compassion, and changes us. Now. Welcome to the Grad Pod.
RASAJNA: Thank you for having me here.
HAYA: First of all, congratulations for winning the 3MT competition. What an accomplishment. It is such a unique challenge, condensing what has already been 3 years of research and is still growing into a 3 minute powerful presentation. So what drew you to compete in this opportunity and how did you approach transforming your research, even though your dissertation is not yet complete, so I am sure there is much more to discover and work on. What prompted you to turn this into a 3 minute story?
RASAJNA: You said it is a very unique challenge and I just thought it will be a really cool experiment to try and condense my research work into a 3 minute story. Like there are two catches. One is obviously the time restriction of 3 minutes, and the second being you are speaking to a non-specialist audience.
So to make it more palatable and not really just like jargon that you do not understand and you zone out. So I just thought it was a really interesting thing to try and I have barely kind of been halfway through my research, so there is more. My idea was I will give it a shot, I will see how it is and maybe I can, you know, try again next year, see what everyone else is doing. But yeah, it was really cool. So with most other presentations we usually give as part of our coursework, it is more to a specialist audience so we can use our technical terms. For those presentations I am not someone who goes by a script usually, but for this one, because there is a time crunch and I am not good with short answers, I explain and explain and it is just like go on random tangents.
So I had to stick to a script. So I started with the script and my first script was somewhere around like five and a half, six minutes. And then I watched a lot of 3 minute thesis videos from YouTube and VCU’s website has finalist videos from previous few years. I saw them. I saw a bunch of TED Talks on related topics, although the format is really different, the TED Talks gave me ideas of how to kind of come up with good analogies and metaphors to explain my work.
So yeah, this is the kind of stuff I have watched a lot. And then I revised my script again and again. I shared my script and recordings of me trying the 3 minute thesis with a bunch of my friends who do not know what my research is. So like asking them, are you even understanding what I am trying to say?
So yeah, that is a lot of writing and revising and practicing.
HAYA: And I have to ask, were there any unconventional things that you did to revise your transcript? Is it something that you completely memorized or.
I really just want you to walk me through your thought process, because I am assuming that you probably selected a few thesis points that you thought were going to be the most important, or those maybe like defined by your friends or maybe your advisor. Like, no, like this is too specific. You need to narrow it down more. And then how did you, I guess, go about memorizing those points? And is it true that people who compete in 3MT, they are just so immersed in their work that they can talk about it anyway. Or again, I just, I wanna learn a little bit more about your thought process.
RASAJNA: Well, we do love talking about our work because that is practically like more than half of our life when we are doing a PhD. It is just like. We are thinking about a project a lot, most of the time. So we do love talking about it, but it is also like when we start talking, we go on for a really long time. It is more like a discussion and you, it is so, to keep it more condensed and short, I had to really filter out. Okay. What is the main point, the takeaway message that I want people to get from this?
Is it all the methods that I use? Is it the idea? Do I want to stress more on the significance of it? I had to. So, and then finally my script landed up somewhere where like the first close to one minute was me explaining the background. What is the problem, what is the significance? Why are we doing this at all?
And second, about like one and a half minute was me trying to explain how are we approaching this problem? I chose to not go too much in detail about my methods. Really, I focus more on the idea and selling that idea rather than the methods itself. Because once you start talking about your experiments, you did so many things, there is no way you can bring that all in 3 minutes. And then towards the end I talk a little bit about my result and my future plan and the impact that I am hoping I would be able to create through this project. So yeah, that is kind of how I divided it eventually, but when I started writing it, it was like. I tried to put in jokes and I was like, okay, I am trying too hard to be funny.
RASAJNA: It is not really going with what I am trying to say. Maybe I am just trying to, you know, sound cool or funny, but like, maybe that is not the point. Yes, like, like sometimes in a good speech, humor is a great tool to use. I personally like doing that as well. When I started doing this, it felt like, okay, at least right now, I am not able to find the kind of joke or the kind of line that goes well with the rest of the thing. It just feels like I am trying to insert it because I want to add that humor. So I started editing a lot of things. And then finally, I actually also used Chat GPT as kind of like a sounding board where like I did not ask Chat GPT to write me things, but I would write my script or record a 3 Minute Thesis presentation and then upload it and ask Chat GPT to critique what are the strengths and weaknesses of my presentation, or if I sent the script, Chat GPT would tell me, this is too many words. You will not be able to say it in 3 minutes. Or like, so, apart from my friends and my family, I also kind of, because this is more accessible, like I am in front of a laptop, I can just, like, whatever I am writing, I can get immediate feedback.
Obviously, you decide to keep some of those, you decide to discuss some of those, but it was like having someone to think with along with you. I would not give the full, I am not the person who would give a prompt and ask it to write, but I use AI a lot for like, as a sounding board to put what I write into it and see what it says about it, and then try to fix some of those things. And so, yeah, I used AI, I repeatedly recorded my presentations. I also tried doing it like in my room. I just put the projector, projected my slide, and like tried doing it exactly the way I would stand.
Where would I point at the screen and show what, like I do not wanna keep constantly looking at the screen. I have to have a couple things that I have to emphasize and go back to my slide because I want to maintain audience eye contact as well. So yeah, all of these things while I was practicing, every time I practiced, I tried to find one more thing that could be better.
And a lot of my friends really helped me honestly. They were very critical of me and like they were like, oh, this is not good. This is good. This is getting boring by the second half minute, or, you know. Yeah.
HAYA: Well, thank you so much for sharing and this is great news. For anybody who hates writing the methods section of the paper, you can just come here to 3MT and brush all over that and go from abstract to conclusions if you got there yet.
HAYA: But also, thank you for highlighting how much of really a performance it is to put together a 3 minute thesis presentation because you are not only, you know, hooking in the audience, which by the way, you did a great job of, maybe not, you did not use jokes specifically, but you made it personal. I think you had said something like, imagine if you had contracted malaria or if someone you loved or something like that, and I was like, oh no, not malaria.
HAYA: But you know, using that as a hook and then also being able to communicate your research, eye contact, body language. There are so many different elements to delivering a successful 3 minute thesis presentation and a lot goes into that. It is like becoming a theater kid all over again, which, you know, for someone in STEM, which a lot of our 3MT competitors are.
HAYA: From STEM backgrounds, it can be a little overwhelming to now have to also communicate that to a non-specialist crowd. But you did an amazing job and I also watched you at the preliminary and the final, and so there were definitely opportunities for improvement and to make it better. And you definitely took that advice in.
HAYA: So the point that we are both trying to make in this conversation is that there is a lot of preparation that goes into just a 3 minute presentation. I mean, weeks worth of practice, and rewriting scripts and sounding boards, and more so well deserved. Moving a little bit more into your research. Your research focuses on Nicotinamidase inhibitors and the potential they have in treating malaria.
HAYA: Could you share with us what inspired you to pursue that line of study and what makes that work stand out in, you know, research about fighting disease? Why this treatment? Why malaria? And what can we really take away from this?
RASAJNA: To be very honest, like when I joined my PhD program, it was not like I already knew that this is what I am gonna work on. This is gonna be my project. I liked a bunch of things. I was like, oh, if I get an opportunity to work on something brain related, it would be cool. It would, you know, like I had a bunch of interests. But I was mostly looking to kind of learn a lot of skills that in future I can apply to whatever kind of research that I wanna do, but I found an amazing team, an amazing PI, and our lab had already been working a lot on epigenes and NAD metabolism and.
Fairly recently, we also started working on malaria. Malaria probably is one of the more recent projects that our lab picked up. Even when I say recent, it is probably like at least five, six years. But compared to other older projects, this is newer and that is because my PI’s old project had something to do with malaria.
And we have someone in our lab who is from Ghana and has grown up personally seeing what malaria kind of a disease, but like a global crisis malaria can be and how it has affected their lives personally. Even me, I come from India. Right now, in India malaria is not such a big problem. But when I was a child, I still heard about a lot of malaria cases and malaria like sudden rise in incidences sometimes in certain parts of the country on the news. The scare is very real, even now in Africa and Southeast Asian countries, although in America, thankfully, it is not a problem. Let us hope it never becomes a problem here, but it is a huge problem in other parts of the world.
So they stumbled on this project, so we work on a couple adjacent projects on malaria. So I was given an option to pick what I want to work on amongst the two, three different things, more than actually several things that we work on in our lab. And this project, it is, it is a huge problem and there is a bigger purpose to it.
For me, research is like half of it is satisfying my intellectual curiosity and like learning new things and constantly exploring new things. And a big part of it is also me really wanting to contribute something to the society, to the world might be a big thing, but like to something, my little contributions.
So in both these aspects, the malaria project seemed very interesting to me. It offered me an opportunity to learn a lot of things and at the same time, we could be onto something and we could, like, this could be a legit contribution, obviously not now. Like when we talk about medicinal chemistry or drug discovery projects, it is a long process.
Like if we start working on something right now, we find one promising compound and then you optimize it and then like somebody else has to do some preclinical trials and then clinical trials. So like even when you land on something, it takes like, you know, 10, 15, 20 years for it to like actually become available in the market and be used as a medication.
So it is a long process, but still, one day when it happens, I will be able to think, oh yeah, I did some small thing in this bigger picture project. So, yeah. Both of these reasons, both the learning opportunity to accumulate so many skills because I was doing some chemistry, some biochemistry, some computation and all of that.
RASAJNA: And at the same time, the bigger purpose of the project. Both of it brought me to pick.
HAYA: Thank you so much for sharing, and I think that is what you did such an amazing job of at the competition, is not only conveying what it is that you are doing, but why we should care and why it is important and why it is meaningful.
I remember sitting there and thinking that, oh wow, treating malaria is very much on the horizon. And like you said, this might be a step along the way, but. Like you also said, it takes a very long time and we have to start somewhere, but you did an amazing job of conveying why we should care, why it is meaningful.
This might not be a problem in the US but for someone like me who also comes from East Africa, I grew up hearing about malaria and you bring a lot of optimistic energy and hopefully tangible solutions in the very near future. So thank you for sharing that aspect of your research too. So up next I wanna talk a little bit about communication.
It is such a vital part of science. It is important to be able to communicate the work that you do to the general public who will hopefully be the beneficiaries of all these amazing things that people like you in STEM are doing. So. What did you learn about yourself and your research through the process of preparing for 3MT?
RASAJNA: I have kind of worked as a teacher, like a high school teacher for a bit before I started my PhD. Kind of have like a natural talent to explaining things or at least. I take the task very seriously and if I do not know something and if I have to present it or explain it, I really dig deep and learn and study and make sure I understand it in a way that I can explain it easily and without making it complicated and like simple terms make it more easily understandable.
So I knew I can break down things and make it easily understandable and simple for people so that something was not a problem for me. But what I realized I am not good at is doing that in a condensed way. So like if I have to explain one thing, I will give you like three, four analogies and three, four explanations and repeat myself.
But I do not have the time for doing all of that. So I had to really perfect my choice of words. So there is like the clarity of what I am thinking and what the person who is listening is understanding it should be the same thing. And it is a little tricky because yes, all my schooling I have done in English and.
But it is still like my second language and the kind of English I have learned versus the kind of English that most people here speak. There is this, there is a little difference, although now that I have been here two years, now I can kind of communicate effectively with most people, but still that.
RASAJNA: That was maybe a little thing that I had to focus on and make sure I pronounce things the way people get it, if not the most common way, but at least like make it a more neutral pronunciation so people do not mistake what I am trying to say.
HAYA: Did you learn British English growing up and maybe the spellings were different? I was just curious.
RASAJNA: So I like to say we learned Indian English in terms of like spellings. Yes. It is like British English. We use U everywhere and S instead of Zs and all that, all that stuff. So writing, yes. The British spellings, but when it comes to speaking, our vocabulary is maybe a little more British than American these days, obviously because of pop culture and we watch all sorts of American shows.
It is more, it is getting more American. Sometimes when I say a word, it does not click immediately to the other person, what I am talking about, but yeah. Over the two years, it has gotten better. That is kind of something I had to, in some corner of my mind, keep it in my mind to pick the right words that are more understandable to most of the people in the audience.
RASAJNA: But everything was the biggest thing that I had to work on. Everything else kind of came easily. The performance part, again, I was also someone who did a lot of theater during my high school, so like I love being on stage and performing, so that part was easy. Explaining things was easy, but keeping it short as well.
RASAJNA: Like I had to really edit, edit, edit, and like I had when my final script basically had like three alternate endings, so I was like, I can see the timer and if I feel like I am going short, I can stop it at the last sentence or the one before that, or the one before that. And it should still seem like it is a proper conclusion.
RASAJNA: That was my biggest challenge and yeah, I do not think I am still good at it going by my answers right now.
HAYA: No worries at all. Well, you already won the competition so you can, you know, go back to yapping. I mean, I can only imagine how hard it is. Again, professional yapper. Come on. I have a podcast over here and I cannot imagine summarizing work that is so meaningful to me.
So many different parts of which I have invested so much time in understanding and developing into 3 minutes. But like you said, you have to think about what is really important to convey. I mean, do I really need to talk about the methods? Do I need to talk about something that, you know, the audience might not even be interested or.
HAYA: Even understand, no matter how many different analogies I provide because again, you do not even have time for those analogies. And so truly for just 3 minutes, so much work goes in so much preparation and it is very impressive. And so congratulations from the Graduate School and we are so excited to have you represent VCU.
At the nationwide competition for 3MT and, you know, one more opportunity to perfect it. But regardless, you have, you have done the thing. So congratulations. My final question for you is, for graduate students who might be hesitant to step into something like 3MT, like you said, being brave is the most important, you know, aspect of preparation. What advice would you give them about sharing their research, building confidence and communicating their ideas?
RASAJNA: I know it seems really like dumb to say it, but just give it a shot. Just go ahead and try it like, okay. First time. You might not be great at it. You get a chance to sit and watch what other people do and then try again.
RASAJNA: You know, practice, read, read work, like read stuff about science both like that is obviously if you are a PhD student, you will be reading a lot of publications and research, but also like kind of like science communication magazines and stuff, because sometimes they do a really good job of breaking down complicated science and explaining it to a common audience. So that kind of gives you ideas of how you can communicate your work better. And if you are someone who has stage fright or has jitters, I guess, like everyone has it to different degrees, but it is probably even good to have it a little bit.
So you should just go give it a shot. Like even this year when I was like, I do not know if I wanna do this because I do not really have a complete project yet. And my PI was like, yeah, just go give it a shot. And I was like, okay, let me just go give it a shot. And then I cleared, I went to the finals and then I was like, okay, let me try, give my best shot again here.
And then it was nice. It was a great experience. So just go ahead and try things. There are a lot of resources. There is a good sense of community here at VCU and like both on a Graduate School level and like even in my department, everyone is really helpful. If you have any doubts, usually people are ready to help you.
RASAJNA: People are ready to sit for discussions with you, so just reach out to people if you need any kind of advice or help.
HAYA: Yes, absolutely. And if you are listening to this and potentially considering participating in 3MT next year and are hesitant. Like Rasajna said, it is a difficult thing. It is not easy, but you have to put yourselves out there and you will not know until you try.
But you also have to know that most people in the room are also sharing the same sentiment. They are probably a little nervous to get up there and share their research and keep it under 3 minutes, but again. If there is room for practice, you do not go immediately into the finals. There are preliminaries where you will get feedback from the judges to improve your presentation.
You will also be able to see your peers get up there and share their research, and there are multiple days for the preliminary competition, so you will be able to literally see everyone go ahead and do their 3MT presentation, give feedback, take feedback. You are not alone in this. With that being said, Rasajna, thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing both your research and your perspective about 3MT.
Your story is a reminder that science becomes even more powerful when it is shared and understood, when it feels meaningful to the audience member, and when it truly sparks a connection that inspires an understanding between what your lab is doing and what someone like me who has absolutely no idea what your lab does.
But I now have a general idea and I know it is important and I am looking forward to continuing to share the sentiment with other people’s research as we continue to host 3MT and meet the participants. So to everyone listening, whether your work takes 3 minutes or 3 years to explain, remember that your research holds meaning.
Far beyond the lab or the classroom. It has the power to inform, move, and to make a difference. So thank you so much for joining us on Grad Pod today. Until the next time!
CREDITS:
Grad Pod is produced by VCU’s Graduate School. Haya Hamid is our host. Our producer and editor is Grace Albritton. Our theme music was composed, performed, and recorded by Austin Sellek and Claudia Andrade, students of Felipe Leitao, Assistant Professor of Composition and Sound Design at VCU School of the Arts.
Do you have a question for us? Email us at gradschool@vcu.edu and we may answer your question on an episode!
