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Meet this year’s winners of the dance your phd contest, this year's contest also featured a special award for best covid-19-related dance..

Jennifer Ouellette - Mar 3, 2021 3:00 pm UTC

The global pandemic ruined most of our plans for 2020, but it couldn't keep graduate students around the world from setting their thesis research to dance, submitting videos produced in strict adherence to local COVID-19 restrictions. With a little help from his friends Ivo Neefjes and Vitus Besel, Jakub Kubecka, a Finnish graduate student, won the contest with a rap-based dance about the physics of atmospheric molecular clusters. Incorporating computer animation and drone footage, Kubecka beat out 40 other contestants to take top honors (and win the physics category).

As we've reported previously , the Dance Your PhD contest was established in 2008 by science journalist John Bohannon. It was previously sponsored by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and is now sponsored by AI company Primer, where Bohannon is director of science. Bohannon told Slate in 2011 that he came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to get a group of stressed-out PhD students in the middle of defending their theses to let off a little steam. So he put together a dance party at Austria's  Institute of Molecular Biotechnology , including a contest for whichever candidate could best explain their thesis topics with interpretive dance.

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The contest was such a hit that Bohannon started getting emails asking when the next would be—and Dance Your PhD has continued ever since. It's now in its thirteenth year. There are four broad categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science, with a fairly liberal interpretation of what topics fall under each.

Over the years, the quality of the videos has improved a bit—Bohannon recalled the first year's winning video just had a postdoc chasing after a couple of graduates to demonstrate mouse genetics—as have the prizes offered. The overall winner now gets $2,000 (a princely sum for most grad students), along with a bit of geek glory, with the individual category winners snagging $750 each. The winner of the COVID-19 dance waltzed away with $500.

According to Kubecka, he co-wrote the music for his video with Neefjes and Besel and initially balked at the prospect of singing/rapping himself. "To prepare for recording the lyrics, I was running with headphones playing the music at least 30 times per day for the whole month to get it into my blood,"  he said . "I think that I even dreamed about it." Once the music was recorded and the dance choreographed, the team had to get permission to film the accompanying video—just as the COVID-19 situation in Finland was worsening.

The trio changed their plans so that they would never be in the same room with more than two additional people (an actor and a camera man) for the indoor footage. They performed a good chunk of the video outside, however. "In our infinite wisdom, we had decided that we would only wear short sleeve shirts throughout the video, which the Finnish winter weather made us suffer for," said Kubecka. "Each outdoor shot started with us throwing away our jackets just off screen, performing the choreography, and then running to get our jackets again." The radar at the local Finnish meteorological institute also interfered occasionally with the drone signal ("sometimes it would just fly away to the Baltic Sea"). But they persevered, and now they have $2,500 in prize money to show for their efforts.

In the remaining categories, Fanon Julienne, a postdoc at the University of Le Mans in France,  won the biology prize with her dance illustrating her thesis, entitled "Fragmentation of plastics: effect of the environment and the nature of the polymer on the size and the shape of generated fragments." Recent MIT PhD Mikael Minier, now a software engineer at WaveXR in Los Angeles, California, won the chemistry prize for his interpretation of his thesis on "Biomimetic Carboxylate-Bridged Diiron Complexes: From Solution Behavior to Modeling the Secondary Coordination Sphere." Magdalena Dorner-Pau, a postdoc at the University of Graz in Austria,  won the social sciences prize for a thesis entitled "Playful (De)Scribers: Examination of performative methods for the promotion of descriptive skills of children in linguistically diverse elementary school classes using the example of image description."

As for the COVID-19 research prize , Heather Masson Forsythe, a graduate student at Oregon State University, won that category with an interpretive dance—performed solo on a beach, in the corridor outside her lab, and in the woods, among other locales—inspired by her thesis research on "Biochemical & Biophysical Studies of the COVID-19 Nucleocapsid Protein with RNA." Forsythe uses nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging to learn about one of the essential proteins encoded in the viral genome. That protein "plays critical roles in multiple processes of the infection cycle, including protecting and packaging viral RNA as a virus is assembled," she explained in her description. "Likely drug treatments could target and disrupt the N-protein’s interactions with RNA, thereby disrupting the building of a virus and replication."

Listing image by YouTube/Simu Group Helsinki

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Watch This Year’s ‘Dance Your PhD’ Contest Winner, a Musical Celebration of Kangaroo Behavior

“Kangaroo Time” took home the competition’s overall prize, while interpretive dances on early life adversity, circadian rhythms and streambank erosion were also honored

Christian Thorsberg

Daily Correspondent

An Australian landscape filled with kangaroos, drag queens, ballerinas and twerking may sound like the onset of a fever dream or a carnival—but for Weliton Menário Costa , a behavioral ecologist at Australian National University who goes by Weli, it was the perfect way to create and share a song about marsupial behavior.

“ Kangaroo Time ,” a four-minute music video about Weli’s years studying eastern gray kangaroos in Victoria, is as fun as it is informative—one of the reasons why it was named the overall winner of this year’s “ Dance Your PhD ” competition.

“It’s super incredible,” Weli tells the Guardian ’s Kelly Burke. “To win an international science competition, it’s like Eurovision—except we all have PhDs.”

Though it might sound unreal, the dancing contest for scientists is “ totally serious .” Weli’s winning video explains his thesis research, “ Personality, Social Environment and Maternal-Level Effects: Insights from a Wild Kangaroo Population .” In his work, Weli found that kangaroos develop their personalities early in life , create social groups and dynamics just as humans do and are influenced to act in similar ways as their parents and siblings. As a queer immigrant to Australia, he tells the Guardian that he can relate to how kangaroos modify their behavior in different groups.

“Differences lead to diversity,” he concludes in “Kangaroo Time.” “It exists within any given species; it is just natural.”

The video’s message resonated with the judges, both scientifically and artfully. “There was a sense of surprise and delight in [‘Kangaroo Time’],” judge Alexa Meade tells Science ’s Sean Cummings. “You could tell they were having fun through the process, that it wasn’t this labored, stressful experience.”

The origins of the “Dance Your PhD” competition can be traced to New Year’s Eve in 2006, when John Bohannon —a microbiologist and director of science at artificial intelligence company Primer—hosted a dance party for his colleagues and friends. The only problem: hardly anyone wanted to boogie.

“It’s very hard to get anyone to dance, particularly scientists,” Bohannon told NPR ’s Barry Gordemer in 2021. “Their parties are not on the dancey side.”

So, like any scientist, he designed an experiment—or, in this case, a dance contest—based on a hypothesis. “One thing you can count on with scientists is they’re competitive and they have a sense of humor about their work, so I thought, let’s just put it all together,” he said to NPR.

The first official contest took place in 2008, and it has been organized every year since by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For 16 years the competition has made its enduring pitch to scientists globally: “Don’t you wish you lived in a world where you could just ask people to pull out their phones to watch an online video explaining your PhD research through interpretive dance?”

Evidently, many do—dozens of videos each year are submitted to the contest, in four categories of biology, chemistry, physics and social science. Science communication skills are key to a successful video, striking a balance between creativity and sharing new findings.

“It’s actually a real challenge, communicating research results and making a clear link between science and the performing arts,” Weli tells the Guardian .

Weli took home the overall winner’s purse of $2,000, in addition to his $750 social science category prize. The three other winning videos this year focused on how adversity in early life can affect how genes work ( Siena Dumas Ang , Princeton University), treating the loss of neurons by targeting a protein involved with the circadian rhythm ( Xuebing Zhang , City University of Hong Kong) and streambank erosion ( Layla El-Khoury , North Carolina State University). In the social science category, the runner-up behind the kangaroos was a video on the invasive browntail moth  in Maine.

Past overall winners have included atmospheric scientists from the University of Helsinki in Finland rapping about cloud formations ; a swing dance about superconductivity from a researcher at the University of Victoria in Canada; and a stylized music video about yeast cells from a researcher at Vilnius University in Lithuania.

For Weli, one of his most meaningful breakthroughs was with his grandmother, who didn’t quite understand his thesis until recently.

“Once I released ‘Kangaroo Time,’ she was like, ‘That’s my grandson! I get it now!’” he tells Science .

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Christian Thorsberg | READ MORE

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue , Sierra  magazine, Discover  magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal .

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‘Joyful madness’: ANU scientist wins global prize for ‘dancing his PhD’ about kangaroos

Four-minute video features drag queens, twerking, ballerinas, a classical Indian dancer and a bunch of friends from Canberra

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The former Canberra scientist Dr Weliton Menário Costa, who now goes by the name Weli, said it “felt like winning Eurovision” when he learned he had won the global “Dance Your PhD” competition, for his quirky interpretive take on kangaroo behaviour.

His four-minute video titled Kangaroo Time features drag queens, twerking, ballerinas, a classical Indian dancer, and a bunch of friends Weli acquired from his time studying at the Australian National University.

The video collected the top prize awarded annually by the American Association for the Advancement of Science , Science magazine, and San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company Primer.ai.

The competition encourages scientists to explain complex research to the wider public through dance, music and humour, and attracts dozens of entries from around the world each year.

“It’s super incredible,” Weli told the Guardian on Tuesday. “To win an international science competition, it’s like Eurovision – except we all have PhDs.

“It’s actually a real challenge, communicating research results and making a clear link between science and the performing arts. In Eurovision, you can do anything you want.”

Kangaroo Time narrowly beat an entry from the University of Maine, in which a second-year ecology and environmental science PhD student used the music of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre to convey her research on the invasive browntail moth.

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Weli collected more than A$4,000 (US$2,750), winning the overall prize and the social sciences prize; it was the fourth time an Australian entry had won in the competition’s 17-year history.

In 2009, a University of Sydney entry won for a dance about the use of vitamin D to protect against diabetes. Two years later, a University of Western Australia entry won for a video about why orthopaedic implants fail; and the following year, a University of Sydney entry won once again for a work explaining the “evolution of nanostructural architecture in 7000 series aluminium alloys during strengthening by age-hardening and severe plastic deformation”.

Weli based his entry on his four-year PhD study on animal behaviour, in a video Science magazine described as “joyful madness”. The judging panel of scientists, artists and dancers praised Kangaroo Time for its “sense of surprise and delight” and its accessible explanation of the science of marsupial group dynamics.

Using a remote-controlled car, the ANU graduate studied the behavioural differences and complex personalities of a group of more than 300 wild eastern grey kangaroos in Victoria.

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He found that like humans, kangaroos’ personalities develop in early life and often mirror the personalities of their parents and siblings; he found they take social cues from the group dynamic, and form social circles like humans too.

His conclusion: “Difference leads to diversity. It exists within any given species, it is just natural.”

The Brazilian-born biologist, who gained a scholarship from ANU in 2017, said he drew on his South American roots and a fascination with Australia’s unique fauna to write, produce and perform in the work.

A queer immigrant from a developing country, Weli said he could relate to how the kangaroos modified their behaviour to conform to the wider group.

“I come from a very humble family, a small town where most of the people are not educated,” he said, of his conservative upbringing. “When I came to Australia I came out to my family … in Kangaroo Time I celebrate diversity in my beautiful Canberra community that [mirrors] kangaroo behaviour.”

Since completing his PhD in Canberra in 2021, Weli has abandoned his academic science career and moved his home base to Sydney, where he is seeking to establish himself as a singer-songwriter.

His first EP – Yours Academically, Dr Weli – will be out 1 March.

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'Kangaroo Time' wins the annual Dance Your PhD contest in Australia

A former academic at Australia National University won the contest for his musical number about the behaviors of kangaroos. Scientists around the world relay their research through interpretive dance.

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