The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, launched Research Communications Award (RCA) to enhance the communication skills of its PhD scholars. The institute honored 11 PhD students for their brilliance in research communications competitions, including the prestigious 3-Minute Thesis competition.

Recently at an event, there were the first lot of recipients who received certificates and a cash award of ₹25,000 each for outstanding research communication. In short, the RCA looks to empower scholars who could increasingly express their research appropriately to a much wider group of people.

One of the highlights of the award program is the Research Story Writing Competition, in which PhD students wrote an interesting story based on their research. They were encouraged to communicate the significance of their work and their personal stake in an appealing way to the common public. The winning stories are available at the official site of IIT Delhi: shorturl.at/offsZ.

Besides the storytelling competition, the 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition forces the students to explain their research in just three minutes to an ostensibly lay audience. Not only does it celebrate the groundbreaking discoveries of students, but also sharpens their skills in communicating abstruse ideas clearly and effectively.

The 11 PhD scholars who garnered the Research Communications Award on account of success in the 3MT competition include:

• Nidhi Nitin Patil, Biochemical Engineering
• Vivek Kumar Nair, Interdisciplinary Research
• Abhishek Nair, Chemistry
• Ankita Raj, Computer Science
• Ritanksha Joshi, Biochemical Engineering
• Kusum Saini, Civil Engineering
• Sushovan Ghosh, Atmospheric Sciences
• Simran Kaur Rainu, Biomedical Engineering
• Ispshita Majumdar, Chemistry
• Shivansh Mehrotra, Materials Science and Engineering
• Anusha Jain, Chemical Engineering

Earlier this year, IIT Delhi also organises a Research Scholar Week, which is an initiative that seeks to empower research scholars in a multiplicity of ways, including through wellness and work-life balance. The focus is on productivity, research visibility, and a living scholarly community within the institute.

The newly introduced Research Communications Award at IIT Delhi is dedicated to training the next generations of researchers in communicating their work, so that this impacts society and finds a strong resonance outside the academic world. This would be one stride toward closing the gap between research and the understanding of the public at large and emphasize the importance of effective communication in scientific circles.