At GW’s 2025 Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, held on Feb. 20, GW Engineering made a strong showing, with participants from four of our six academic departments–biomedical engineering (BME), electrical and computer engineering (ECE), engineering management and systems engineering (EMSE), and mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE). This annual competition serves as an invaluable platform for these competitors to refine their communication skills and showcase the interdisciplinary nature of GW Engineering research by presenting their dissertations in just three minutes.
Last year’s winner, Leah Kaplan of the EMSE Department, set a high bar for the competitors. This year, GW Engineering’s participants included Andre Calado (MAE) with “Turbulent Air Entrainment and Bubble Dynamics: High-Fidelity Simulations and Data-Driven Analysis”; Oluwadamilola Oke (BME) with “Addressing Concerns of Pigmentation Bias in Light-Based Medical Devices”; Weijie Pan (EMSE) with “Renewable Expansion and Its Influence on the Electricity Market”; and Jiaxing Yang (ECE) with “Three-Layer Radar Sounder Model for the Detection of Buried Ice Deposits under Martian Regolith.” Among the judges was Zhenyu Li, a BME associate professor.
For Pan, hearing from other disciplines reinforced the inherent interdisciplinarity of EMSE research. “My work integrates technical development, economic considerations, and policy implications, which can engage a broader audience and spark greater interest in EMSE programs,” Pan explained.
Pan’s research investigates the impact of integrating renewable energy into existing electricity markets by exploring competition between renewable generation operators and prosumers– end-users generating electricity, such as solar panel owners. He analyzed system performance and costs using various modeling approaches, revealing a critical threshold for renewable capacity. Below this threshold, real-time market mechanisms support operators' profits, while a day-ahead market is more suitable above it. Pan says these findings highlight the need for system operators and policymakers to adopt a flexible structure that balances decentralized physical systems with centralized governance.
In preparing for his presentation, Pan reviewed recordings of past competitions and concluded that relating his research to the audience’s daily lives would be the most effective. His analogy compares market competition between system operators and prosumers to gambling, where “system operators act as the house, and all energy end-users are players at the gambling table. The amount of energy prosumers are willing to sell back to the system represents their bids.”
Launched in 2008 by the University of Queensland, the 3MT competition is now held at over 600 academic institutions. It was brought to GW in 2019 and has expanded continuously ever since. Now hosted by GW’s Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs, 2025 was the second year it featured competitors from all GW schools. By participating, GW Engineering students not only get to share years of hard work but also gain valuable experience in distilling it for a broader audience, a crucial skill for their upcoming dissertation defenses and future careers.
As Pan noted, “I observed how [other competitors] captured the audience’s attention–whether through compelling opening stories, engaging speaking styles, interactive techniques, or expressive body language. Learning from these moments will be incredibly valuable in preparing for my dissertation defense, conference presentations, and job talks.”