Congratulations to Erinn Fagan-Jeffries from The University of Adelaide, who beat off competition from thousands of applicants across 27 countries to make it through to the top 12 at the FameLab International Final last week.
Erinn, who won the Australian competition at the Western Australian Museum in May, flew to the UK to battle it out against some of the best science communicators from around the globe at the Times Cheltenham Science Festival.
After captivating the crowd at Wednesday's semi-finals with her brilliant horror-film tale of parasitoid caterpillar killing wasps, Erinn joined Thursday's grand final alongside scientists from Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, Qatar, South Africa, Spain, UK and USA.
The audience and judges were fascinated by presentations on a range of topics, from entertaining tales of exploding cicadas to a folk song about the Riemann hypothesis.
Erinn's final presentation on the discovery of a whole new world underneath the seemingly uninhabitable Western Australian desert showed once again how arts skills mesh with science to create interest in new discovery and research.
We applaud Erinn on her outstanding result and congratulate Abhi Veerakumarasivam from Malaysia, who claimed the title of 2016 FameLab International Winner for his presentation on the link between cancer and the life cycle of our cells.
"The experience of being part of FameLab International has been incredibly immersive and inspiring," Erinn says.
"Meeting other young science communications from 26 countries and feeling united in our love of science has fed my passion to try and seed that same wonder and excitement in people everywhere"
Since its debut at the Times Cheltenham Science Festival in 2005, FameLab has grown into one of the world's leading science communication competitions. It aims to discover charismatic, up-and-coming scientists who can explain complicated scientific concepts in a fun and accessible way in just three minutes.
Find out more at famelab.org.au or watch last week's FameLab International grand final on YouTube.