Carla Bassi is the Ivy+ 3MT People’s Choice!
UC Berkeley doctoral researcher Carla Bassil earned the People’s Choice Award at the 2026 Ivy+ Three-Minute Thesis Competition, held virtually on June 10, 2026, and hosted by Princeton University.
UC Berkeley’s 2026 Grad Slam Champion
Her journey to the Ivy+ stage was marked by a string of competitive wins. Bassil first took first place at the UC Berkeley campus Grad Slam competition, then represented Berkeley at the UC systemwide Grad Slam on April 22, where she placed second among the champions from all ten UC campuses.
The Ivy+ 3MT brings together top graduate student researchers from a select group of peer institutions, including Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. Each institution hosted its own local competition and selected a single representative to advance to the Ivy+ stage. This year’s 3MT was the inaugural competition between the universities.
Machine Learning and Food Safety
Bassil, a third-year EECS Ph.D. student in Professor Ali Javey’s lab at the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (BSAC), presented a three-minute talk “Machine Learning Assisted Gas Sensor Chip for Food Safety Applications,” detailing her development of a multi-sensor gas sensing chip that combines hardware innovation with machine learning to detect spoilage, allergen contaminants, and volatile organic compounds relevant to food safety and human health.
The winner of the Ivy+ People’s Choice Award was selected by audience members who voted during the live event, a testament to Bassil’s ability to connect with a broad, non-specialist audience on the significance of her research.
Originally developed at the University of Queensland, the 3MT competition challenges doctoral students to communicate the significance of their research clearly and concisely, in just three minutes and with a single static slide. Carla’s presentation, as first delivered at UC Berkeley, 2026 Ivy+ 3MT is an excellent model of the effective communication of complex research.
The UC Berkeley’s Graduate Division congratulates Carla on this well-deserved recognition!
This article was written by Jonathan Landeros-Cisneros, a professional development liaison for GradPro and a PhD candidate at the Berkeley School of Education.