What Can You Say in Three Minutes?

It also helped her earn first place and a $2,500 cash prize at UC San Diego’s 13th Grad SLAM competition. In her energetic, award-winning talk, “The Early Bird Gets the Worm: How Physical Activity Influences Sleep and Brain Health,” she explained how those natural timing preferences — known as chronotypes — may shape not only how we sleep, but how our brains age.

Alongside Grad SLAM, the event also featured the second annual Postdoc PITCH competition, where Ido Avivi, a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Medicine's Divison of Cardiovascular Medicine, took top honors for communicating his research on preventing heart attacks by targeting inflammation, including how widely used GLP-1 drugs may play a role.

Held April 2 at the Qualcomm Institute, the back-to-back competitions challenged graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to distill years of research into compelling three-minute talks for a general audience in the style of a TED Talk.

Participants were evaluated by a panel of judges from across campus on clarity, organization, delivery, appropriateness, intellectual significance and engagement.

This year’s finalists, who were selected from a large pool of video submissions, tackled a wide range of topics — from artificial intelligence and error-free software to Zika vaccines, virus-fighting “fake cells” and even how people form connections with one another — highlighting the breadth of graduate and postdoctoral research across campus.

For Dean of Graduate Education and Postdoctoral Affairs Judy Kim, that breadth — and the ability to communicate it — are what make the annual event stand out.

“There are a few moments in my role that make me most proud — welcoming students, commencement and this event,” Kim said to the participants as she complimented them on what she called “polished and wonderful” presentations. She noted that their ability to clearly communicate their work makes them powerful ambassadors for research beyond campus, particularly at a time when the future of science increasingly depends on public understanding and support.

Eckhardt, who presented her findings alongside eight other graduate student finalists, will go on to represent the campus at the University of California Grad SLAM Final Round in Sacramento on April 22. The competition brings together one finalist from each of UC’s 10 campuses, judged by leaders in academia, media and industry, with $18,000 in total prize money at stake and the coveted “Slammy” trophy on the line. The event will be livestreamed at 10:30 a.m., and Tritons are encouraged to tune in to cheer her on and vote for her to win the People’s Choice award.

A fifth-year PhD student in the School of Medicine's neurosciences graduate program, Eckhardt studies how circadian rhythms and exercise influence one another and their role in Alzheimer’s disease risk. Her Grad SLAM presentation centered on her study of more than 200 adults who wore wrist-based devices for several weeks, allowing researchers to track sleep and activity patterns in real time.

Her team also used brain scans to measure levels of amyloid beta, a protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease, and found that participants with more irregular sleep patterns had higher levels.

Building on that connection, Eckhardt found that individuals who moved more — especially earlier in the day and within a more narrow window — tended to sleep longer and more regularly. The findings suggest that even for night owls, adjusting daily activity habits, and not just sleep schedules, could help support sleep and long-term brain health.

For Eckhardt, preparing for Grad SLAM meant rethinking how to share that message.

“The people who helped me shape this talk are the non-scientists in my life — my mom, my dad, my boyfriend,” she said. “They helped me figure out what makes sense to them.”

She also credited the collaborative nature of the competition, where finalists worked together to strengthen each other’s presentations — even while competing for the top prize — through coaching sessions and workshops led by the Center for Student Involvement.

Avivi’s winning Postdoc PITCH presentation, entitled “Uniting Two Revolutions: The Future of Heart Attack Prevention,” focused on a different but equally urgent challenge: how to prevent heart attacks before they happen.

He framed his three-minute talk around what he described as two converging revolutions in medicine: widely used GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound, and a growing understanding of the role of inflammation in heart disease.

His research explores whether GLP-1s, commonly prescribed for weight loss and diabetes, may do more than improve metabolic health. By reducing inflammation in fat tissue surrounding the heart, they could help stabilize arterial plaque and lower the risk of heart attacks, potentially opening a new, more targeted approach to prevention.

Second place in the Postdoc PITCH competition and a $1,500 prize went to Jiyo S. Athertya in the Department of Radiology for her talk, “Her Hidden Strength: Imaging Bone at Risk,” while third place and a $750 prize was awarded to Virginia Chu Cheung in the Department of Pathology for her presentation “Pregnancy, Disease and Hope.”

In the Grad SLAM final round, second place and a $1,500 prize was awarded to Michael Reiss, a graduate student in the Department of Bioengineering, for his presentation “Locating Pathways of Irregular Heartbeats,” and third place and a $750 prize went to Sai Krishna Bhamidipati, a graduate student in the School of Biological Sciences, for his talk “Stoplights in Your Brain.”

Avivi will go on to represent the campus in the Torrey Pines Training Consortium’s Postdoc PITCH competition on Oct. 23, where he will compete against postdoc finalists from the Salk Institute, Sanford Burnham Prebys and Scripps Research.

He says that for him, the challenge wasn’t just the science — it was making sure it reaches the people it’s meant to help.

“We work so hard to discover things that are supposed to serve the common good, and if we don’t communicate that, then it gets lost,” Avivi said.