Energy in Three Minutes

Avigail  Landman, a doctoral student at the Technion, won first place in the Three Minute Thesis competition in Australia

Avigail Landman

Avigail  Landman, a doctoral student in the Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP), won first place in an international lecture competition in Brisbane, Australia. In the competition, participants must present a scientific-technological subject related to their thesis in just three minutes.

The subject of Landman’s doctoral dissertation, supervised jointly by Prof. Gideon Grader from the Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Prof. Avner Rothschild from the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering, is the production of hydrogen using solar energy. “More specifically, I am designing and developing a system that will make it possible to use solar energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen will be produced in the solar field itself, while the hydrogen will be produced directly on the premises of the end user, for example at a hydrogen fueling station.”

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition in Australia was held by the University of Queensland, and Landman came on Prof. Grader’s recommendation. She said, “We worked together on the script, we recorded the video here at the Technion with the generous assistance of Ami Hartstein from the Center for Promotion of Teaching, and sent it to the competition. A few weeks later, I was informed that I had been chosen as one of the 16 finalists in the competition and was invited to deliver the lecture in Brisbane. In the end, I won first place in the energy category, one of the three categories in the competition.”