The Yale Graduate School of Arts & Sciences hosted the final round of its annual 3-Minute Thesis Competition on March 26. The full competition is divided into four rounds: Humanities and Social Sciences, Engineering and Applied Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Physical Sciences which were held throughout February 2026. The first and second place winners of each round went on to the Final Round where the overall winners were selected along with audience choice awards. Now in its 10th year, Yale’s 3-Minute Thesis Competition challenges PhD students to present their research to the public – in just 3 minutes!
Yarone Tokayer, a fifth-year physics graduate student working with Frank van den Bosch in Astronomy, placed first in the Physical Sciences round. Tokayer commented, “The 3MT was a fun and challenging way to improve my presentation skills and work on distilling my work into a very concise and accessible form.” He continued, “I discussed my work in self-interacting dark matter, explaining its appeal as an alternative to the more standard dark matter paradigm based on astronomical observations. I also discussed the more exotic consequences of self-interacting dark matter, namely, that under certain conditions large structures of it can collapse to form black holes. This could address one of the biggest open questions in cosmology, how the very first black holes formed so early on in the universe. I tried to emphasize the key idea of how physical models for particles on the smallest scales can reshape some of the largest structures in our universe.”
Suzanne Young, Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Professional Development and McDougal Center, stated “This is our 10th year of hosting the 3MT at Yale. It is also hosted at universities across the U.S. and the world and originated in Australia at the University of Queensland. Each year, about 35-40 graduate student from across the disciplines compete in preliminary round events, and the top two winners receive both prize money and the chance to move on to the final round. The goal of the event is to promote public speaking about university research to an audience of non-specialists. The judges for the events come from among Yale’s deans, directors, and alumni, and also include Dean Cooley. It is meant as a fun, challenging competition that gives graduate students a chance to polish their public speaking skills. Each year, we have about 3 or 4 Physics candidates and we would love to see more!”
See below for a link to the original story and other related links.