Keith Hengen took a deep breath. Standing in front of a packed auditorium, he asked everyone to remember the last time they were completely rattled by sleep deprivation.

“Hallucinations, loss of language, personality changes,” he ticked off as audience members nodded. “We all know what it feels like when we get so tired that everything begins to unravel. We take for granted that eight solid hours of sleep and, boom, we’re back in business.”

As an associate professor of biology, Hengen was used to presenting his groundbreaking research on sleep in academic papers and even a TED Talk. But this was no typical presentation to peers, with nearly an hour of detailed slides.

This time, he had to make his case to the public in just three minutes — about as much time as a typical television commercial break.

“When time is short, you have to get people’s attention,” Hengen said. “Researchers are used to building up a scientific story. With just a few minutes, you have to turn that on its head. You have to figure out what keeps people up at night and how your work could make an impact on that.”

That was the charge for Hengen and nearly a dozen Arts & Sciences research teams participating in the inaugural A&S Research Pitch Competition, a rapid-fire showcase designed to build momentum and demonstrate the impacts of transdisciplinary research.

The event — billed as part “Shark Tank,” part “America’s Got Talent” — gave research teams in chemistry, English, political science, art history, and more a chance to pitch their projects to a crowd of more than 100 university and community members with the goal of getting new audiences excited about the many ways research can change lives.

“There is tremendous research happening every day in Arts & Sciences,” said William Acree, vice dean of interdisciplinary initiatives and innovation. “We wanted to give our faculty a new platform to showcase and share their work in a way that makes external parties say, ‘I want to be a part of that; it’s going to make a real impact.’”

Researchers from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities presented projects from smart textiles that can repair themselves through polymer chemistry to an exhaustive artificial intelligence analysis of police camera footage that could help lower the rate of violent encounters with law enforcement.

The audience included a wide range of Arts & Sciences faculty and community members, as well as representatives from WashU’s Office of Technology Management and the St. Louis business community, all of whom voted for their favorite pitches after the event.

The top three vote-getters received small cash awards, but most said the real prize was the opportunity to practice communicating their research to broader audiences.

“Ultimately, scholarship is about sharing knowledge,” said Shankar Mukherji, an assistant professor of physics who uses quantum science to explore how diamonds could hold a key to diagnosing and preventing metabolic diseases and even cancer. “Everyone should have to do something like this, especially graduate students who need to make sure they can explain what they’ve learned.”

For at least one of the winners, the three-minute format did more than force the team to present its research in new ways. “It actually encouraged us to think about the research itself differently,” said first-place winner Gabi Kirilloff, an assistant professor of English whose work could help fight gender stereotypes in AI language models. “We hadn’t really thought about turning our findings into a product for everyday use until the pitch competition. It really encouraged us to say, ‘OK, if we were going to sell a product based on this research, what would it be?’”

The answer? A possible AI application that could help companies and their employees evaluate gender bias in emails, presentations, and other written content. “People would then be able to assess and say, ‘This email I just wrote has some gender stereotypes that I wasn't aware of and that I don't want to perpetuate,’” Kirilloff said.

“The Research Pitch Competition offered a compelling glimpse into the positive changes Arts & Sciences is driving locally, nationally, and globally,” said Feng Sheng Hu, the Richard G. Engelsmann Dean of Arts & Sciences. “We invited the community to the event to spark even greater momentum in St. Louis’s incredible innovation ecosystem so that people would walk away with a sense of the endless possibilities for impactful research powered by WashU.”

In preparation for the event, each of the presenters had the opportunity to attend a workshop with the Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a WashU resource for creating, launching, and scaling innovation ventures.

“The process was helpful because it forced me to say, succinctly and accessibly, what my work is about and why it matters beyond academia, in everyday workplaces and local communities,” said Clarissa Rile Hayward, a professor of political science whose presentation about her upcoming book on the politics of power earned third place. “There’s a real energy that comes from a broad, live audience responding positively to your work. Every time the research resonates, it creates confidence that what we are doing makes a difference.”

But is it really possible — and valuable — to boil down years of research into three-minute elevator pitches? For Acree, who spearheaded the event, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

“We want to show the impact of what we're doing to the largest number of people possible, which means we have to be able to communicate in a way that people understand. This is a really important time for public trust in research, and, if we want to build trust in what we do here at WashU, the public has to understand what we are doing.”

In Hengen’s case, the pitch paid off. He took second place in the competition and, after it ended, he had fruitful conversations with audience members about securing more funding and support for his work, which explores a brain state called “criticality.” Teaming up with physicists and other biologists, Hengen is developing a theory that explains the role of criticality in health, sleep, and disease. He hopes his insights will eventually help doctors predict and even prevent the development of brain disorders like Alzheimer's disease.

“It feels like this kind of event could only happen at a place like WashU,” Hengen said. “At a giant university, you’re probably not going to be able to get people from all these different departments in a room together. Smaller institutions generally don’t have the level of research we have here. WashU straddles that fence with a supportive, close-knit, small school vibe that has the depth of a large research university. To put those two things on display simultaneously in a way that's also accessible to the broader community, that’s impactful. It made me remember why I chose to come here.”