51cg

The Contest

To enter the contest, email openresearch@abdn.ac.uk by midnight 29 October:

• Photo(s) of your completed pumpkin(s)
• A short (under 100 words) explanation of how your carving relates to your thesis along with the title of the thesis
• Your name, pronouns, school or department, and on campus address (lab or office if you have one)

We will close submissions at the end of the day on 29 October, by the end of the day on the 30th of October we will have chosen the top entries and opened them for voting. The best PhD pumpkins will be posted online and in the lobby of Sir Duncan Rice Library. Be sure to promote your pumpkin across your own social media, for the glory of your own lab or team! Voting will close at 9:00GMT on 2 November and a winner will be announced by end of day.

The Rules

1. Entries must be submitted by the end of the day on 29 October 2025
2. By submitting you agree to apply a Creative Commons- Attribution license to your photo and text, allowing it to be re-used as long as you are properly credited, for more info see
3. You must be a 51cg student to enter
4. While you are sending in an image, the contest is for pumpkin carving, so there should be an actual pumpkin. Digital images will be rejected (you can use a digitally added background if you don’t want to have to clean your flat or something).
5. Any entries containing materials that are offensive or vulgar, or contain third-party copyrighted material will be rejected.

Winner

Yujun Wang (she/her)
Department: Computing Science

Summary: My research explores how language expresses time and temporal relationships, learning how LLMs to understand when events happen and how they relate. I carved a python on my pumpkin to represent the language that powers much of my work — Python — and to capture the spirit of weaving through timelines in text. The sudden fall of my pumpkin also unintentionally reflected the unpredictable nature of time itself!

Runner-up

Christopher N. West (He/Him)

Department: Practical Theology in the School of Divinity, History, Philosophy & Art History

Thesis title: Inordinate Rites: Symbolic Actions in Irish Anglican Ordinations and the God-Talk of the Infrequent Worshipper

Summary: My research challenges the idea of liturgy as pristine or self-evident, focusing on those who rarely attend church but join ordination services to support loved ones. It examines how symbolic actions gain meaning, especially the custom of many priests laying hands on candidates – depicted through overlapping handprints and rubrics on my decorated turnip. This raises questions: what makes the laying on of hands meaningful, and does involving many reveal uncertainty in symbols? I present liturgy as fragile and unstable, shown by cracks and tape on the turnip – yet such fractures can reveal insight, symbolised by gold and silver lacquer.

Winner!

Name: Kiki Bordean (She/Her)

Thesis title: Reconstruction of the spatial ecology of pleistocene Ursidae

School of Geosciences, Department of Archaeology

Description: My pumpkin depicts a brown bear which makes a good Jack O' Lantern because whilst bears are cute from afar, up this close to one is pretty scary. The focus of my PhD is reconstructing the ecology of Ursidae species in the Pleistocene. I will be comparing cave bears, brown bears and maybe even polar bears. My job is to find out what they ate, where they roamed and if any of these changed with space or time. This is a negative carving meaning I carved out the highlights as opposed to the shadows like in regular sculpture.

Runner-up

Name: Lucy Koster (She/Her)

School of Geosciences, Department of Archaeology

Thesis Title: Fragments of a soul: integrating (and interrogating) a DNA and multi-isotope data to reconstruct the individual.

Description: My thesis is about using multiple scientific methods such as DNA and isotope studies to investigate the lives of individuals, including mobility and familial relatedness from early medieval Scotland. To do this, I have taken samples from skeletons and analysed many different types of data. My pumpkin shows a skeleton gleefully with a drill and beaker to show the scientific aspect of my PhD, but also the joy of telling the of each of these people from the past, with them at the centre of everything!

Winner!

Mhairi McInnes (She/Her): Winner! School of Engineering Inertial Sensors for Clinical Movement Analysis of the Upper Limb: Improving Accuracy and Accessibility

My PhD is all about using inertial sensors for tracking joint angles of the human arm. Human movement data can be really useful for assessing patients with any kind of disordered movement (e.g., stroke, spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy, Parkinsons). Inertial sensors are a simple bit of tech which can be easily attached to the body segments you want to track, but their accuracy can be unreliable and dependant on the attachment method. The aim of my project is to improve the accuracy and reliability of inertial sensors by incorporating the constraints of a musculoskeletal model.

Runner-Up

Georgia Cash (she/her): Runner-up!

School of Biological Sciences

Thesis title: The evolution of sociality in subsocial animals

My dissertation will look at the evolution of social living in subsocial animals, using Blaptica dubia cockroaches as a model species. I will work with a laboratory population of dubia roaches, as well as studying these roaches in the wild in their native South America, to investigate the factors which promote the evolution of sociality and group living in subsocial animals. I carved a dubia roach on my pumpkin to represent my project, and also share my love for my study species!

Here are some links were you can find other great pumpkins, or other ways to express your PhD

• Dance Your PhD Contest Winners:
• Elphinstone Institute’s annual Neepie Lantern contest: /elphinstone/public-engagement/neepie-lantern/
• Entries in to the Carve your PhD Contest at Liverpool John Moores University
• Art History Pumpkins:
• Something a bit easier:
• Jack o’ Lantern basics:
• Open Source silhouettes for all sorts of animals: