Coimbra Group Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Final & 2020 Arenberg-Coimbra Group Prize for Erasmus students Award Ceremony

The Coimbra Group, a network of 41 long-established European universities, is delighted to invite you to the live final of the Coimbra Group Three Minute Thesis competition on 22 October at 10am (CET). Tune in on our YouTube channel to watch on live streaming the pitches of the three finalists of our annual flagship event on science communication followed by the announcement of the winner of this 4th edition.

This year, the event innovates with an interactive session on ERA4You in the presence of Ms Anna Panagopoulou, Acting Director for Research & Innovation Outreach at the Directorate General for Research & Innovation, European Commission. ERA4You is the European Commission’s future initiative for strengthening researchers’ mobility opportunities in the framework of the recently adopted “Communication on a new European Research Area for Research and Innovation”.

The event will conclude with the Award Ceremony for the 2020 Arenberg-Coimbra Group Prize for Erasmus students which acknowledges, every year since 2007, the crucial added value of Erasmus+ exchanges to students’ Master degree work.

The Coimbra Group strongly values the importance of training young researchers on science communication. It is for this reason that, each year since 2017, under the auspices of the Doctoral Studies Working Group, it has invited PhD candidates from its member universities to participate in a network-wide competition based on the model developed by the University of Queensland, Australia. A total of 19 researchers have taken part in this fourth edition of our competition. This year the three finalists are:

• Mr Vicente Artola Arita: PhD Candidate University of Groningen. 3MT presentation title: One size does not fit our hearts
• Ms Selina Bruns PhD: Candidate University of Göttingen. 3MT presentation title: Sustainable Economic Development of Smallholder Farmers in the Larger Mekong Region
• Ms Maria Francesca Di Filippo: PhD Candidate University of Bologna. 3MT presentation title: Functional properties of chitosan films modified by snail mucus extract

Watch the finalists on October 22 as they rise to the challenge of summarising months’ worth of hard research work in only three minutes in a language free of technical jargon and accessible to a lay audience. A judging panel of five members from Coimbra Group universities will assess their performances on the basis of comprehension, content, engagement and communication.

After the interactive talk on the European Commission’s ERA4You initiative and the announcement of the winner of the 2020 Coimbra Group 3MT, we will celebrate the Award Ceremony for the 2020 Arenberg-Coimbra Group Prize for Erasmus students.

We are pleased to announce that this year’s award will go to Ms Maddalena Centanni, a graduate in Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences from Leiden University. Ms Centanni, who is now a PhD candidate both at Uppsala University and the University of Amsterdam, had spent her six-month Erasmus exchange at Uppsala University in 2017-2018, where she had the opportunity to work with and learn from leading scientists in her field as well as to access new material and methods. We are honoured to have the Arenberg Foundation President, H.S.H Duke Leopold d'Arenberg, joining us to bestow the award to Ms Maddalena Centanni.

The full event schedule will be published soon.