Nathan Jones

Winner of the 2022 Visualise Your Thesis competition

For the last four years, Nathan Jones has been researching what feelings are and how we might be able to use colour to predict emotional states and understand them. When he found out about the Visualize Your Thesis competition, he knew it was a great opportunity to explain in one minute what his research was all about. “We are so defensive about how smart we are in academia. And we can often think that distilling our research is called dumbing it down. But I think it's the hardest thing to do.”

The Visualise Your Thesis competition celebrates research conducted by graduate research students around the world. Applicants are challenged to present their research in a 60-second, eye-catching digital display. Nathan’s video “Conceptualising emotion in 3D space using colour” won the first prize in 2022. Watch below:

“I think the nature of my research is very visual. When I tried explaining my research to others, I started talking about colours and emojis as emotions. And people think I'm doing a bizarre arts therapy, interpretive dancing degree, and their eyes glaze over. But what I’m doing is data-driven and very much grounded in colour theory and psychological science.”

Nathan encourages all graduate research students to participate in this competition, “I'm certainly not a video editor by any means, but it was a great opportunity to be able to use a medium like the Visualize Your Thesis format to show my research, the data, and the use of colours and how people respond to it on a more emotive level.”

Registrations for the 2023 Visualise Your Thesis competition are now open. The winner will receive a prize of $1000 and the opportunity to compete in the International online showcase hosted by The University of Melbourne. All successful submissions qualify for 5 CaRST points.

To learn more about the competition and check out last year’s submissions, visit Visualise Your Thesis.