By Stephen Adeleye
A Nigerian-born medical doctor and international multiple award-winning author, Dr Kennedy O. Obohwemu, has emerged winner of the ”Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition” 2022, organised by the University of Sunderland, United Kingdom.
The three-minute thesis competition is an annual competition held in more than 200 universities worldwide.
It is open to PhD students, and challenges participants to present their research in just 180 seconds, in an engaging form that can be understood by an intelligent audience with no background in the research area.
This exercise develops presentation, research and academic communication skills and supports the development of research students’ capacity to explain their work effectively.
An 80,000-word thesis would take nine hours to present.
The contestants (PhD students) have a time limit of three minutes to present their research in language appropriate to non-specialists, and with only one single presentation slide to support them.
Developed by the University of Queensland, Australia in 2008, the success of the 3MT has led to the establishment of local and national competitions in several countries.
As of 20th December 2019, there were at least 85 participating countries from every continent (apart from Antarctica) and at least 941 institutions.
The competition challenges doctoral candidates to present a compelling spoken presentation on their research topic and its significance in just three minutes.
At 100 words per minute, researchers needed to write 3 x 100-word speeches with absolute precision and present them in the form of a spoken word contest.
Since 2014 Vitae have proudly hosted the UK ®3MT competition which is the culmination of finalists from Vitae member Higher Education Institutions throughout the United Kingdom.
Active PhD and Professional Doctorate (Research) candidates who have successfully passed their confirmation milestone (including candidates whose thesis is under submission) by the date of their first presentation are eligible to participate in 3MT competitions at all levels.
Joining the rich tradition, the University of Sunderland held their 3MT contest on Friday 13th May 2022, which was open to PhD students from all nationalities, across all faculties and campuses of the university (Sunderland, London, and Hong Kong).
Multiple award-winning Nigerian writer, and Spoken Word Artist and leadership Coach, Dr. Kennedy O. Obohwemu, emerged winner of the competition by unanimous decision.
With his presentation titled, ”Childhood Vaccinations: Our Collective Responsibility’’, Dr. Kennedy swept the audience off their feet with his characteristic poise, style, elegance, and class.
Dr. Kennedy’s research focuses on parental childhood vaccine hesitancy, an increasingly important public health concern in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world.
Vaccine hesitancy is associated with a decrease in vaccine coverage and an increase in vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks and epidemics.
Many studies have focused on understanding and defining the relatively new socio-medical term, vaccine hesitancy; few have attempted to measure the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy in the UK.
Using conceptual frameworks based on the Protection Motivation Theory, Dr. Kenney’s research quantifies the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy in the UK and examines the association of vaccine hesitancy with sociodemographics and childhood vaccination coverage.
The research attempts to aid public health professionals with a catalogue of health interventions and strategies to ultimately address and prevent parental vaccine hesitancy in the long term.
Monitoring vaccine hesitancy could help inform immunisation programs as they develop and target methods to increase vaccine confidence and vaccination coverage.
