Lisa Eckert, left, dean of Graduate Education and Research at Northern Michigan University, congratulates Madeline Hernstrom-Hill on winning the graduate student category in Wednesday’s Three Minute Thesis competition at Mead Auditorium. Participants had three minutes to discuss a research topic to an audience. (Journal photo by Christie Bleck)

MARQUETTE — Topics ranging from medieval lesbianism to a migration study of the Upper Peninsula to whether cannabis can be used to treat brain tumors highlighted Wednesday’s Third Annual Three Minute Thesis competition at Northern Michigan University.

Graduate students and McNair Scholars — who are part of a federal program to help first-generation college students obtain a Ph.D. — presented their theses at Mead Auditorium.

Taking first place in the graduate competition was Madeline Hernstrom-Hill, whose presentation was “Saints and Sinners: Love Between Women in the Middle Ages.”

Hernstrom-Hill said she worked on her thesis for about six months in a year-long program, with her dissertation being about 50 pages.

“I think the Middle Ages are the best time in history,” she said. “I think that they’re this age of fascinating light.

“They’re this age of complex religion and complicated social movement and sort of extraordinary beauty in terms of music and in terms of text and architecture, things like stained glass, luminations of manuscripts and I just think it’s this sort of, just this endless, endless canvas that you can just go into everything for, including lesbians, which is my favorite thing, because I’m a lesbian.”

Hernstrom-Hill and the other participants were restricted to talking about complicated subjects in only three minutes. They also were limited to using only one PowerPoint slide and weren’t allowed to use electronic media or props.

Placing second in the graduate competition was Grant Steinacker, who walked about “The Effects of Organic and Synthetic Fertilizers on Fiber and CBD Oil Production in Cannabis Sativa L.”

The People’s Choice winner among the graduate students was Rachael Nelson, who spoke about “Killer Lettuce: Detecting Pathogenic E. Coli.”

The winner of the McNair competition, who also was the People’s Choice winner, was Cynthia Benson, whose topic was “Volunteer Molesters: Justification Patterns of Sexual Abusers Within the Boy Scouts of America.”

Benson said that files she examined in her research included resignation letters and narratives describing the incidents.

“In my 123 case files, I was seeking to determine themes, and if I could come up with themes, I could use these themes to compare to other offender groups and determine that volunteers were their own type of sex offender,” Benson said, “and with my study, I was able to do just that.”

She came up with five themes: avoiding discussion on the incidents altogether, victim-blaming as a justification, blaming Boy Scout policies, sexual abuse in their childhoods being largely perpetrated against children and simply admitting to the incidents without elaboration.

Placing second was Shumete Sam, who spoke on “The Practice of Self-Reflection Among Young Adults.”

Janelle Taylor, NMU coordinator of graduate student/research affairs in Graduate Education and Research, said 3MT participants should talk about their research subjects in a way that can relate to everyone regardless of their knowledge of those subjects.

“The main point of doing Three Minute Thesis is that students are able to take their research, talk about it in a short period of time and present it to a general audience,” Taylor said.

The annual competition is held at more than 900 universities in more than 80 countries, having been developed by the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in 2008.

The top NMU competitors will receive a cash prize, and Hernstrom-Hill will receive $500 and travel to the Midwest Association of Graduate Schools competition in Milwaukee in April.

Other participants in the category for graduate students were Mallory Jones, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman & The Forerunner: An American Periodical,” and Katerina Lushnikova, “Can Cannabis Be Used to Treat Brain Tumors?”

Other competitors in the McNair Scholars category were Anthony Cergnul, “Perspective,” a focus on the colonization of indigenous and First Nations people; Grace Freitag, “Morphological Variation in the GI Tract of Migratory Waterfowl,” who talked about the gastrointestinal tracts of various duck species and the Canada goose; Ryan Meister, “Where (the Hell) Are All the People Going? A Migration Study of the U.P. 2005-2015”; and Jalen Sims, “Urban Summer,” about graffiti and using it in business and creatively.

Judges for the graduate and McNair competitions were Marquette City Commissioner Evan Bonsall; Jim LaJoie, executive director of the Superior Health Foundation; Tammy Nyen, associate superintendent of special education at the Marquette-Alger Regional Educational Service Agency; and Mike Rochon, a counselor at Marquette Senior High School.

Christie Bleck can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 250.