University of Edinburgh PhD student Lokesh Jain has won the prestigious Coimbra Group Three-Minute Thesis Competition. His research uses a supercomputer to model how icebergs and sea ice melt around the Greenland ice sheet to try to narrow uncertainty in future sea level rise.

Lokesh uses a supercomputer to run simulations to find out how fast sea levels will rise in the future. He can predict how quickly the ice melange will melt by varying the temperature of the air or the ocean. He has developed an equation that will determine just how quickly ice will melt as temperatures rise, which other scientists can use to improve long-term climate models. 

“This equation is like one little piece of the jigsaw puzzle of how climate change will affect our planet,” Lokesh says.  

Lokesh advises students who want to take part in the 3MT competition that less is more: “It’s tempting to shove as many results as you can into the speech but there really isn’t time for it especially with only three minutes. You have to spend one to one and a half minutes introducing the topic, and then have time at the end for the conclusion and wider picture, so you only have about a third of the speech to focus on what you yourself have contributed.

“A really strong analogy or metaphor makes a difference when explaining your research so I settled on the idea of a cork in a bottle to explain what ice melange does. I think that really helped in communicating my message.”

Read the full story and watch an interview with Lokesh here.