From algorithms to jam jars and Shakira

How I designed an award-winning 3MT talk about my horizontal gene transfer inference algorithm.

The Challenge

The 3MT® competition pushes researchers to compress years of thesis work into a 3-minute performance. No jargon, no slides full of graphs. Just one image and your voice. My thesis? Algorithm design for detecting horizontal gene transfers. My challenge? Making it funny, engaging, and understandable to everyone.

The Plan

I took the leap and enrolled in the EFD 908 course at the University of Sherbrooke, designed to teach public science communication. The final exam? Presenting your thesis in a bar. I started preparing six months in advance, aiming to turn complex algorithms into everyday analogies.

The Brainstorming Journey

My research focuses on horizontal gene transfer, a mechanism by which bacteria share antibiotic resistance. But how could I make an audience feel the stakes?

At first, I turned to humor and familiarity, grounded in immigrant nostalgia for my country, specially the food:

Funny, but too casual. Besides, it makes bad propaganda for mexican street food.

The shift came when I discovered the tragic story of Calvin Coolidge Jr., the youngest son of a US president who died from a blister infection in his shoes. That anecdote introduced the real stakes of antibiotic resistance with emotional weight:

This narrative instantly grounded my message: antibiotic resistance isn’t abstract, it’s terrifyingly real. No one, regardless of their status is safe.

Designing the Message

I knew I wanted a metaphor that didn’t rely on the misleading “family tree” imagery so common in evolutionary biology. It had to be memorable, visual, and precise.

That’s when Shakira entered the picture. Yes, that Shakira ( or as we say in spanish: *lero-lore-loreee).

Inspired by the pop star discovering her (ex) partner’s betrayal through an empty jam jar, I reframed my algorithm.

This metaphor captured the essence of outlier detection, which is at the heart of my algorithm for inferring horizontal gene transfer.

Behind the Scenes: Creative Exercises

A key turning point in my preparation came from an EFD908 class exercise: reducing our research to a single object. My first choice was a book—thinking of genomes as literary narratives. That helped me shape earlier versions of the talk, but the metaphor eventually gave way to something more emotional and sticky (pun intended): jam.

I experimented with analogies around exam cheating, DNA “libraries,” and bacterial rebellion. I even toyed with metaphors that linked algorithm speed to sorting through books in a library. But I let go of those ideas once I realized they diluted my main message.

The Slide & the Title

Originally titled:

The French pun worked well for a Quebecois audience. But when I transitioned to English the sense of the phrase is not culturally the same, and so it was lost. I had to find something punchy and memorable.

Enter:

A playful nod to Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie”, since SNPs is actually pronounced ("sneeps") ,and a perfect way to highlight the molecular “tells” that reveal bacterial gene transfer.

The Result

Months of planning, testing, rewriting, and performing led to a talk that won the Université de Sherbrooke 3MT competition. Beyond the recognition, it became one of the clearest articulations of my research, not just for others, but for myself.

This is the final script I used for my 3MT presentation:

Imagine one day you decide to go out with the wrong size of shoes. A week later, you end up dead. Crazy right? This was the reality a century ago, just before antibiotics.

Antibiotics can save us from the deadliest of circumstances, even those as tiny as an infected blister on your toe. Nevertheless, this might change soon because bacteria have found out ways to cheat and avoid being killed by them. One way is called horizontal gene transfer, which is an evolutionary event in which bacteria share the molecular secret of antibiotic resistance between them.

During my PhD, I have developed an algorithm that is able to tell us how these exchanges happen. How do I do that? It all starts with an empty jar of jam.

Do we have any fans of Shakira in the audience! Nice! Do you know how she found out her ex was cheating on her? This story also involves an empty jar of jam. You see, Shakira is the only one in her family who likes jam. So after she came back from a tour and saw that her favorite jam was slowly disappearing, she started suspecting of an external influence.

Finding out how bacteria cheat works in a similar way. People living in the same household are like bacteria that share similar traits. For example, being prone to dying when exposed to penicillin. If we spray them with penicillin and see that they are still alive, something fishy is going on.

The kitchen cabinet of each of these households is what makes them unique. It contains all the precise ingredients that organisms need to live. In biology it is known as the genome. The empty jar of jam corresponds to something that is unusual or missing in this cabinet. It could be for example, the most common type of genetic variant, called SNPs.

The whole affair story is called a phylogenetic network. Of course we want to know all the details! The juicy ones in our case correspond to evolutionary events, such as gene transfers. The goal of my algorithm is to tell me all about it.

My algorithm works like Shakira: We give it a couple of bacteria; it separates it into groups that share similar elements. Then it looks at their kitchen cabinets and starts pointing out unusual events, and finally come up with a story of how it all happened.

With this algorithm we are one step closer into understanding antibiotic resistance and since our SNPs don't lie, hopefully changing the future.

Reflections & Tips for Future Communicators

Start early. Six months of preparation gave me the freedom to iterate creatively.
Anchor your talk in emotion. The Coolidge anecdote set the tone better than stats.
Use metaphors sparingly and precisely. Not all analogies are created equal.
Lean into your personal voice. The taco story wasn’t wrong, it just wasn’t the story I needed for this audience.

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