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Rabat – Moroccan Ph.D. student Jihane Kenfaoui from the University of Sidi Mohamed ben Abdellah in Fez won on Thursday the Audience Award at the “Ma thèse en 180 secondes” (My Thesis in 180 Seconds, MT180) competition in Montreal, Canada.
Organized by the French-speaking Association for Knowledge (ACFAS), the competition featured French-speaking post-doctoral students from across the world. The candidates gave a three-minute presentation on the subject of their thesis in French before the audience.
“This journey has been overwhelming for me,” Kenfaoui told Morocco World News, highlighting the various skills she learned during the competition, as well as the “hidden talents” that she discovered.
The 25-year-old studies at the Faculty of Sciences and Technologies in Fez’s (FSTF) National School of Agriculture in Meknes. Kenfaoui noted that the competition gave her the opportunity “to show to the people that science can be accessible to everyone.”
“I was overwhelmed by the amount of Moroccan support [I received] especially here in Montreal,” Kenfaoui stressed. She received the award after gathering the most votes from the audience.
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Grateful for the enormous support she has received, Kenfaoui thanked each and every Moroccan for “the support and the good energy” they have sent her way, allowing her to offer her best at the event.
Kenfaoui’s thesis focused on “the prospection and diagnosis of grapevine trunk diseases in Morocco and the elaboration of alternative control methods.”
The Jury of MT180 awarded the First Prize to Mane Seck from Gaston Berger University in Senegal for her thesis on the development and characterization of nanomaterials based on the gum arabic and almond trees.
The jury’s Second Prize went to Sophie Rivara, a Ph.D. student at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland for her thesis which tracked interactions in the immunity system
Mammy Henintsoa Randrianjatovonarivo from the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar won the jury’s Third Prize for her analysis on the creation of linguistic variations in Madagascar.
