Enrique Saldarriaga, PhD candidate in the School of Pharmacy and The CHOICE Institute, has won first place in the 2022 UW Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition. His dissertation, The Value of Using Local Data to Allocate Resources to Fight the HIV Epidemic: Case of Study in Atlanta, Georgia, combines statistical methods and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases to quantify the economic and health value of using local estimates of disease frequency to inform resources allocation for HIV prevention and care.
The 3MT is a professional development competition that celebrates the exciting capstone and research experiences of master’s and doctoral students at the University of Washington from all three campuses. The competition supports graduate students’ capacity to effectively explain their research or capstone project in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a public audience.
‘Impact’, the theme for the 2022 competition, can be defined as the positive outcome of a critical intervention, social policy, service provision model, legal framework, or technological innovation. Enrique’s research will provide a positive impact across several disease areas, including infectious diseases, cervical cancer, obesity and obesity-related conditions, and urology.
Enrique’s career goal is to generate evidence to inform decision-making processes that reduce health care access barriers among historically underserved demographic groups.
“My time at UW has provided me with extremely valuable lessons and resources to achieve this objective,” he said. “After graduation, I will join the Prevention Effectiveness fellowship at [the] CDC to assess strategies and interventions to prevent and reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.”
Competition day finalists were selected from the preliminary rounds, based on the following presentation criteria: content, clarity, oral communication, visual communication, and theme.
“The UW 3MT competition provides an amazing opportunity to think about our studies in an engaging and accessible way to a general audience,” Enrique noted. “Winning UW 3MT is a recognition that I am on the right course in my communication skills development and a great motivation to continue working on them.”