Three minutes isn’t a lot of time to explain complex research to a general audience, but College of Veterinary Medicine graduate student Dr. Miranda Medrano has done just that—and received accolades for it.

Medrano earned second place in the University of Minnesota’s Three Minute Thesis Competition held on Nov. 10, 2023, which tasked participants with explaining their thesis subjects in three minutes to an audience of non-experts.

Medrano qualified for the universitywide contest by winning the St. Paul campus’ Science in Seconds competition, where she competed against students from the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences and the College of Biological Sciences. At the university level, Medrano took on nine competitors representing a variety of UMNM schools and colleges. As the second-place winner, she received a $250 prize.

Advised by Drs. Marie Culhane and Cesar Corzo, Medrano’s thesis is titled “Outdoor Pig Farms, What’s the Big SQUEAL?” and focuses on investigating how non-traditional pig farms in Minnesota deal with disease and health issues. (Learn more about Medrano’s work here.)

A majority of production pigs are raised indoors on large farms, but some producers choose to raise their swine with access to the outdoors.

“Unfortunately, though, due to the smaller number of pigs raised with outdoor access, these farms have largely been ignored by the U.S. veterinary industry, meaning that the health status of their pigs and their farming practices are fairly unknown,” Medrano told the crowd, “which leads my research question: Does raising pigs with outdoor access lead to an increase in disease frequency when compared to pigs that are raised indoors?”

As part of her research, Medrano sent a survey to more than 200 pig farms in Minnesota, learning that the number of pigs on these farms varied from four to 500 animals and that more than one-third had never had a veterinarian consult on their animals’ health.

“Going forward I plan on using mathematical modeling to identify specific farming practices that might lead to an increase in disease risk so they can be targeted and changed to help decrease disease in the future,” Medrano says. “When all is said and done, the information gathered from this project will go a long way to ensuring the longevity of these farms and improving the pigs' health.”