Dance Your Ph.D. is a contest wherein scientists express their research through dance. The purpose of the contest is to educate by explaining complex theories through interpretive dance. The contest was first held in 2008. Dance Your Ph.D. is sponsored by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Science magazine, and Primer.ai, an artificial intelligence technology company.
Origins
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." 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.
Dance Your Ph.D. started as a live event at the IMP Vienna in 2008. 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.
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?" In response to the demand, Science officially launched the Dance Your Ph.D. contest in 2009 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.
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. In the first three years of the contest, Dance Your Ph.D. videos had been viewed over 750,000 times. 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.
Winning entries
13th annual contest winners - 2020
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.
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” uses breaking, tutting, animation, robot, and waving dance styles to explain his thesis. 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.
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. Through dance, Dorner-Pau attempts to answer the question “how do we describe in words what we see?”