Congratulations to Alejandra Quintos on winning the audience’s favorite at the Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition.

GSAS doctoral student Alejandra Quintos, a sixth-year PhD candidate in Statistics, won Audience Choice for her presentation Using Mathematics to Help Impoverished Women, via Microlending. Her advisor is Dr. Philip E. Protter, Professor in the Statistics Department.

Quintos commented that she participated in the competition because she “wanted to share with the community how useful mathematics can be to solve a real-world problem. Moreover,” she continued, “given that I want to pursue a career in academia, I thought the 3MT competition would be a tremendous opportunity to improve my presentation skills…and I had a lot of fun in the process!”

View Alejandra’s 3MT slide here (title and abstract below)

Title: Using Mathematics to Help Impoverished Women, via Microlending

Abstract: Muhammad Yunus developed the idea of Microlending, that of making a tiny loan to a group of peasant women who had been excluded from the cash economy, to help them start or continue a micro business that would lift them out of impoverishment. He chose a group size of five women who would assume joint responsibility for the loan. However, he did not explain his choice.

Although Yunus’ work earned him a Nobel Peace Prize, Microlending has been abused, and group size has been ignored. We put the choice of the group size within a mathematical (probabilistic) framework and we show that under the right, and, we believe, reasonable hypotheses the optimal group size is indeed five people. We thereby justify Yunus’ initial choice of five women as the ideal group size. It is hoped this may help to inspire a more coherent approach to Microlending in third-world countries.

Congratulations to all of the competition’s twelve finalists.

Photo with all the finalists.

Photo with Ph.D. students who earned 1st and 2nd place.