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The 2024 Three Minute Thesis final competition will be held Feb. 7, from 4 to 6 p.m.

What is the best way to distill a multitude of information into just three minutes?

That’s the question ten graduate students will be wrestling with as part of the Graduate School’s seventh annual Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, which will be held in the University Memorial Center’s Glenn Miller Ballroom on Feb. 7, 2024, from 4 to 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, but .

This event challenges students to explain their thesis to the general public. They are then evaluated by a panel of judges from across the university, including College of Arts and Sciences Dean Glen Krutz, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Associate Dean Charles Musgraves, Professor of Sociology Lori Hunter, and Physics Professor and Nobel Laureate Eric Cornell.

In the days leading up to the event, we’ll be featuring each of the competitors, starting with Leopold Beuken. Beuken is a doctoral student in mechanical engineering with a focus on robotics whose 3MT presentation’s title is “Flight by Feel.”

If you had to describe your research in one sentence, what would you say?

Simple, bio-inspired methods to control dynamical systems.

What did you do before coming to ���񱦵� for graduate school?

Undergrad at the University of Pretoria and Petrochemical Engineer.

What led you to pursue your doctoral degree in your field of study?

Incredible undergraduate research opportunity at MIT.

What is your favorite thing about the research you do?

Using very simple principles from biological systems and applying them to the physical robots we build.

Tell us a random fact about yourself

A dog chased me out of France once.