In the final round, 12 PhD students (10 women and 2 men) from 12 Catalan universities remained. The participants had to present the object of their doctoral thesis to the public in an attractive manner and in no more than 4 minutes.

The key was to effectively summarise and change the register of the content of the thesis, maintaining the text’s scientific rigour while making the information more accessible to the general public in a short period of time.

All participants were PhD candidates in at least their second year of the thesis. None of them were allowed to have defended their thesis prior to submitting their application at their university. The contest was divided into two stages: the first was an initial qualifying round that took place at each university (in which 133 people from 12 universities took part); while the second, the final round, held on 6 June, featured the winner from each university.

Altogether, three awards were handed out to the participants with the best presentations: the first-place award, which consisted of a cash prize of €3,000, went to Alicia Sánchez, a doctoral student at the Pompeu Fabra University; second place, worth €2,000, was given to Gabriela Montiel, from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; and the audience award, which earned the recipient prize money of €1,000, went to Abril Sánchez, a PhD candidate at UIC Barcelona.

The jury was made up of Rafael Marín, director-general of the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation, holder of a PhD in Linguistics; Mercè Jou, secretary-general of the Interuniversity Council of Catalonia; Tomàs Molina, head of Meteorology for Catalan Public Television, physicist and journalist; Elsa Velasco, scientific journalist for “Big Vang” (La Vanguardia), holder of a Master’s Degree in Scientific Communication; and Sònia Fernández Vidal, holder of a PhD in Optics and Quantum Information, writer and advocate.

The contest was supported by the Government of Catalonia and the Movistar Centre.