Announcements

The Power of Community: Priscilla Atim on Earning the “Most YouTube Views” Nutshell Games Award

December 15: Almost two months after the 2025 Nutshell Games, the final of five winners has been determined. Priscilla Atim, biomedical and veterinary sciences Ph.D. student, has won the “Most Views” award for her talk, “Catching sneaky survivors in a fungal drug escape.”

    Atim was one of 29 graduate student presenters at the October 23 Nutshell Games event, held live at the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. At the event, which debuted in 2017, each researcher has just 90 seconds to explain their work to a public audience.

    The competition for this year’s “Most Views” award, the first for the graduate student competition since the event was held online during the COVID-19 pandemic, was slightly different than its previous iteration. This year, videos appeared both as main channel videos and vertical “YouTube Shorts” on the Center for Communicating Science’s YouTube page. 

    The contest motivated many presenters to share their videos. During the month of the contest, the 28 posted videos garnered 18,106 views on the main channel page and 16,216 views on the Shorts page. Between the two platforms, Atim garnered over 16,000 views in one month – over 8,000 views on each of the two videos. This staggering number of views means that Atim’s videos are the most-viewed videos from both the 2025 Nutshell Games and on the entire CCS YouTube channel.    

    YouTube Shorts views tend to rely on passive, algorithm-based recommendations while scrolling; for a main channel video, potential viewers must actively choose what they watch. Despite these key differences, Atim found success using similar strategies across both platforms. Her greatest strength was her network.

    “My strategy relied on lots and lots of networking among the lab, fellow graduate students, friends, and family,” Atim shared. During the month before the “Most Views” winner was determined, she set weekly viewing goals for her videos, encouraging her networks to share the video far and wide. This peer-to-peer sharing strategy is what Atim compares to “tell a friend to tell a friend,” like the word-of-mouth marketing strategies that many businesses use.

    Atim’s friends, labmates, and family spread her video primarily through WhatsApp, a global, widely used social media platform where posting and reposting video links is simple. Atim also attributed the video’s spread to the fact that people found the video topic and the Nutshell Games concept intriguing. 

    “It turns out people really enjoyed the talk…The Nutshell Games were also a new and interesting concept to many, so there was genuine curiosity and enthusiasm” from her peers, Atim explained.     

    She also made sure to like and respond to comments on the videos, driving engagement and forming a small community to rally around her videos. As Atim’s network connected to her talk, they also rooted for her success. Atim would share updates on the video so that “viewers feel like they were part of the project, not just passive viewers.” Outside of the competition, Atim framed sharing the video as a communal effort in science communication: “Let’s get the word out there on fungal drug resistance,” she stated.

    Even before earning the “Most Views” award, Atim had left the October 23 Nutshell Games feeling like she had a winning experience. 

    “Thank you so much for the training and support!” she wrote in an email afterwards. “I’m excited to move forward with the skills I’ve gained. It made me really happy when many people walked up to tell me they understood my research. That was great feedback!”

    Congratulations to Atim on winning the “Most Views” award! Her success in promoting her talk far and wide has taught the CCS more about sharing science communication with social media. Check out Priscilla’s videos on the Center for Communicating Science YouTube channel and Shorts page.

By Bria Weisz, Center for Communicating Science graduate assistant

For the full 2025 Nutshell Games story, click here!

For more news about the Center for Communicating Science, see our newsletter page, our VTX (News and Stories from Virginia Tech) page, and the "Other News and Media" section of our News page.