2026 3MT Finals celebrate grad student research and mentorship

Tue. Mar. 24, 2026

3C00 was the place to be on March 19 as six of the 12 semi-finalists took to the stage for the 2026 Three-Minute Thesis Competition finals! Judges and audience members alike commented on the sheer passion and talent on display at UWinnipeg's premiere showcase of graduate student research and ingenuity! 

The Winners

At the 2026 Finals, judges chose Imogen Bellinger (MSc, Bioscience, Technology, and Public Policy) for the $1,000 Second Place Prize. Imogen's talk, "Can They Cope? Testing the Limits of Brook Trout in a Changing Climate", was about how elevated temperature and carbon dioxide levels affect juvenile brook trout, and how scientists can use that information to mitigate the effects of climate change on aquatic ecosystems.

Tabitha Evans (MA, Environmental and Social Change) wowed the interdisciplinary audience with “Powering Sustainable Energy Transitions Through Diversity”. Tabitha took home the $500 People’s Choice Award for her talk on the value of studying how interdisciplinary researchers work together to make impactful change.

Ishadie Namir (MSc, Applied Computer Science and Society) won the $2,000 First Place Prize.  In her research, presented in three minutes as "Seeing From Space: Helping AI Describe Satellite Images Accurately", Ishadie develops methods to help artificial intelligence (AI) describe satellite images more accurately by teaching it to connect text and images through contrastive learning.

Faculty Award for Outstanding Graduate Mentorship

The 2026 Three-Minute Thesis Competition shared the stage with the announcement of the inaugural recipients of Faculty Award for Outstanding Graduate Mentorship. This award was introduced to celebrate faculty members for The Faculty Award for Outstanding Graduate Mentorship recognizes faculty members with a record of excellent mentorship and/or supervision of graduate students.

Outstanding mentors foster creativity of thought, novelty of research, and provide the underpinnings for graduate students to succeed in and out of academia. Doctor Caleb Hasler and Doctor Sheela Ramanna were announced as the first University of Winnipeg faculty members to receive this honour. It made for a serendipitous evening: Dr. Hasler supervises the 3MT second-place recipient Imogen Bellinger, and Dr. Ramanna supervises first-place recipient Ishadie Namir!