Mark your calendars: It’s time for the Nutshell Games! In this fast, fun, and friendly research presentation competition, 30 graduate researchers will tell their research stories in just 90 seconds to a public audience and a panel of judges representing both Virginia Tech and our local community — including, as always, a 7th grader. In fact, this year we'll have two 7th graders on the panel!

    The Nutshell Games will take place at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, November 2, at the Moss Arts Center. Presented by the Center for Communicating Science, this event is open to the public free of charge. Registration for the Nutshell Games is open to all Virginia Tech graduate students, and spots are filled as registration forms are received.

    With presentations on research from six of Virginia Tech’s colleges, you'll learn about dancing quarks, salt-eating bugs, detecting landmines by listening, controlling alien species, the secrets to time travel, using QR codes to track the flight time of bees, the limits of mathematics, and much more, all in less than an hour.

    This year’s panel of judges includes

  • Dennis Dean, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus
  • Phyllis Newbill, Associate Director of Youth and Community Education, Center for Educational Networks and Impact
  • Giang Nguyen, Blacksburg Middle School 7th grade student
  • Menah Pratt, Vice President for Strategic Affairs and Diversity
  • Karen Roberto, University Distinguished Professor; Executive Director of the Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment
  • Emmy Spotila, Blacksburg Middle School 7th grade student
  • Aimée Surprenant, Dean of the Graduate School
  • Abby Walker, Director of the Language Sciences Program

    A 3-hour preparatory workshop for all participants was held October 23. Facilitated by Center for Communicating Science faculty Patty Raun, Carrie Kroehler, Brittney Harris, and Jon Catherwood-Ginn, the workshop helps researchers build their communication skills, find the story in their research, and distill their work into 90 seconds. As with all the center’s work, the focus is on helping speakers communicate personally, directly, spontaneously, responsively, and with emotional vividness.

    Participants are provided with a simple set of rules:

  • Have fun with it! 
  • Your presentation must be 90 seconds maximum. Presentations longer than 90 seconds will be disqualified.
  • No PowerPoint slides or additional electronic media (e.g., sound or video files) are permitted. One prop or visual aid is permitted (e.g., a piece of lab equipment or large photograph). 
  • You must speak in prose! No songs, poems, raps, etc. 
  • The judges' decision is final. 

    They’re also given the criteria used by the judges in selecting five winners:

  • Did the presenter make a connection with the audience?
  • Did the presenter communicate the importance of the research?
  • Was the research accessible to a non-specialist?
  • Did the presenter capture and keep their audience's attention?
  • Did the presenter convey enthusiasm or other emotion related to the research?
  • Did the presenter convey a sense of confidence?
  • Did the presentation make the audience want to know more?

This year's participants include

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences:

Lindsay Johnson, Time will tell: Calibrating honey bee flight duration as an estimate of distance flown, Entomology

Abdulhadi Kobiowu, Disarming the yellow fever mosquitoes with genetics, Biochemistry

Demian Nunez, Sniffing out solutions to cucumber beetle IPM, Entomology

Kelley Sinning, Do bugs like salt as much as we do?, Entomology

Hannah Swarm, Rooting out wireworms: Testing new insecticides for crop protection, Entomology

Gayatri Vanamala, How sowing soybean also sows nitrogen into the soil, Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences

College of Engineering:

Keshav Bhateja, Factoring numbers so big, even math gave up, Computer Science

Edwin Eyram Klu, Let's protect our machine surfaces. How? Thin-film protective coatings!, Materials Science and Engineering 

Jubel Kurian, Tiny particles, big problems: Keeping helicopters safe in dusty skies, Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

Anirban Mukhopadhyay, Scaling truth: Using open-source intelligence (OSINT) to fight misinformation, Computer Science

Mahima Prajapati, Wings in motion: Mass and flutter dynamics, Aerospace and Ocean Engineering

College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences:

Kamla S. Al Amri, CARE for faculty development, Instructional Design and Technology

Aline de Souza, The potential of artistic work to disrupt anti-immigration discourses, Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought

Isabel Valdivia Leiva, Stress and executive functions – what's math got to do with it? Human Development and Family Science

College of Natural Resources and Environment:

Mary Adebote, Fish on the move: How climate change is shaking up summer flounder fisheries, Fish and Wildlife Conservation

Anu Rai, Lost elephants & found never-seen-before creatures… Now what? Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation

Sonia Sharma Banjade, Quantifying forest productivity from space, Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation

College of Science:

Gyang Chung, Dancing quarks: The secret party life of quarks in the atomic nucleon, Physics

Andrew Cooper, Using statistics to make things simpler (really!), Statistics

Jesse Garrett-Larsen, COLD TO GO! Cold temperatures and seasonal sickness, Biological Sciences

Jonathan Gendron, Evaluating meta-regression techniques: A simulation study on heterogeneity in location and time, Economics

Andrew M. Gunsch, Left-handed electrons and the weak force: Not a mirror image, Physics

Ainul Huda, Understanding thermoreceptors using fruit flies, Neuroscience

Krishnanand Karthikeyan, What if our universe is like a giant quantum computer, running on its own code? Physics

Rose McGroarty, Sonic de-boom! Detecting landmines using noise in the ground, Geosciences

Esther Oyedele, Where did our water go? Geosciences

Tori Shimozono, Fighting back against the invisible killers, Biological Sciences

Prescott Vayda, Unearthing the secrets to time travel, Geosciences

Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health:

Nazia Bano, Sticky molecules: The secret behind ovarian cancer spread, Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health

Noor Tasnim, Brain activity during different cognitive tasks in young adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health