Dance Your Ph.D.

Dance Your Ph.D. is an international science competition founded by John Bohannon, who studies microbiology and artificial intelligence, is a former contributing correspondent for Science, and the current Director of Science for Primer.ai. Bohannon explained that the idea for Dance Your Ph.D. began at a New Year’s Eve party that was “heavy on scientist attendees and light on the dancing."[1] To get people up and moving, he turned the party into a dance contest where the attendees had to explain the research project they were working on without using words.[1]

Dance Your Ph.D. started as a live event at the IMP Vienna in 2008.[2] From across Europe, scientists gathered to watch their colleagues explain their Ph.D. thesis with interpretive dance. A Ph.D. or Doctor of Philosophy is the highest academic degree awarded in a course of study. Candidates pursuing a Ph.D. are required to engage in applied or original research to test a theory and to add to the existing body of knowledge in their particular discipline or field of study.[2]

Dance Your Ph.D. was never intended to develop into a yearly event, but the question starting coming from scientists around the world asking "When is the next dance contest?"[2] In response to the demand, Science officially launched the Dance Your Ph.D. contest in 2009 [2] The four winners from that year's contest worked with professional choreographers to conduct a scientific dance experiment where participants were asked to match the dance to the science that inspired it.[3]

In 2010, the categories for the event switched from grad students, postdocs, and professors to the scientific fields of biology, chemistry, physics, and social science.[4] In the first three years of the contest, Dance Your Ph.D. videos had been viewed over 750,000 times.[4] Bohannon surveyed everybody who had participated in the contest and asked them why they danced as scientists. He discovered that while most did it as a means of education, one danced to explore the spontaneous assembly and falling apart of the cell’s skeleton on microtubules while others did it to reexamine their work, similar to writing an abstract, or to celebrate the intersection of art and science.[4]

Physics and Overall winner: Jakub Kubečka

Jakub Kubečka, Ivo Neefjes, and Vitus Besel are Ph.D. students of Atmospheric Science at the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research (INAR) at the University of Helsinki in Finland. In 4 minutes and 37 seconds, the researchers combine rap and dance to describe their research into the computational study of molecular clusters. Through their research, Kubečka et al. hope to, among other lines of inquiry, understand the processes related to atmospheric molecular clusters. “This can make it easier to evaluate the dangers posed by air pollution and hopefully lead to policies or technologies that improve, for example, urban air quality” says, Kubečka.[5]

Chemistry: Mikael Minier

Mikael Minier, Ph.D. is a graduate of MIT, a former member of inorganic chemistry Professor Stephen J. Lippard’s research group, and a current software engineer at WaveXR, located in Los Angeles. Minier’s interpretation of his dissertation “Biomimetic Carboxylate-Bridged Diiron Complexes: From Solution Behavior to Modeling the Secondary Coordination Sphere”[6] uses breaking, tutting, animation, robot, and waving dance styles to explain his thesis.[7] Minier, who has an interest in science edutainment, entered the competition to challenge himself to find an unconventional way to teach chemistry. He was able to combine his passion for dance with his chemistry background. “Moving forward, I hope to use gaming to explore edutainment in a professional capacity,” said Minier.[7]

Social Sciences: Magdalena Dorner-Pau

Magdalena Dorner-Pau is a postdoc at the University of Graz in Austria where she is a member of the Faculty of Humanities. Her areas of work include didactics of the humanities, teaching and learning research, language teaching research, didactics, and the performing arts. [8] Through dance, Dorner-Pau attempts to answer the question “how do we describe in words what we see?”[9]

Biology: Fanon Julienne

Fanon Julienne is a Postdoctoral researcher for Ariane Group in ENSAM and a student at Le Mans University in France where she is studying the problem of the accumulation of plastics in water. [10] In her dance explanation of her thesis "Fragmentation of plastics: effect of the environment and the nature of the polymer on the size and the shape of generated fragments" she illustrates how water and sun affect the breakdown of plastic and pollute the water using two teams of belly dancers.[11]

COVID-19: Heather Masson-Forsythe

Masson-Forsythe used ballet, modern dance, and hip hop to explain how to stop the coronavirus from replicating. She is a researcher at the Barbar Lab in the Biochemistry & Biophysics department of Oregon State University. In the final scene of the video a graphic appears stating “Dance choreography in this video takes place over 300 seconds, one second for every thousand people who have died from SARS-CoV-2 as of December 2020 in the United States alone.[12]

Participants must produce a video of the participant dancing his/her own Ph.D., solo or as part of an ensemble, and must (1) post that video on www.youtube.com, complying with all of You Tube’s rules and regulations, including permission to use any music included in the video and the right to show the individuals depicted in the video; and (2) allow AAAS/Science Magazine to use the video for publicity. Winners are selected based on the aggregate of three scores: scientific merit, artistic merit, and the creative combination of science and art. Thus, the best dances insightfully reveal the scientific content of the Ph.D. thesis, show artistry to create a compelling spectacle, and creatively combine these two aspects into a successful production. The participant receiving the highest total score awarded by the panel of judges will win the Grand Prize, consisting of a payment of $1000 sponsored by AAAS/Science Magazine.[26]

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