Dance Your Ph.D. is a contest that invites Ph.D. students to interpret their research with dance videos instead of PowerPoint presentations. The submitted dance videos range from the research fields of Biology, Physics, and Chemistry to Social Sciences. The contest was launched in 2008 and, since then, has been generating annual submissions from Ph.D. candidates from all over the world. It is being sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in conjunction with its top academic journal Science Magazine. ¹ ²

When I stumbled upon this contest, I was immediately impressed because I have always enjoyed When I stumbled upon this contest, I was immediately impressed because I have always enjoyed projects that master the intersection of information and entertainment charmingly. Thus, I ended up watching dozens of those contest-related dance videos. I would like to present to you my favorite ones below.

Effective Environmental Protection Policies

Florence Metz is a social scientist whose research field includes the governance of environmental issues. With her dance video about water protection policies, she won the Dance Your Ph.D. contest in 2015. The performance’s main takeaway was that the conscious interaction between different dancers—i.e., stakeholders representing the industry, agriculture, science—leads to a more sophisticated overall dance performance as opposed to solo performances.

What I most enjoyed about this submission was how elegantly the thesis’ content pieces were being transferred in the video clip; the water bodies were expressed as fishbowls and different interests were represented by different dancing styles. While the stakeholders’ dancing performances symbolized the positioning and communication of their respective interests, the sudden disruption of the dancing music highlighted the blocking of the whole policy-making process that veto players would initiate.

Social Experiences and Brain Activities

Antonia Groneberg is a neuroscientist and dancer who successfully combined both of her passions in a dance video, demonstrating the brain activities of larval zebrafish. In short, she investigated in her Ph.D. thesis the brain activities of baby fish in order to understand how these activities vary depending on the fish’s social behavior. While one group was raised in an isolated setting, another group experienced social interaction instead.

As a result, their respective social behavior turned out to be antisocial for the first sample and social for the second sample. As the heads of larval zebrafish are transparent, the activities of every neuron were tracked with the help of light. Accordingly, larval zebrafish, as research objects, made it possible to investigate the influences of social experiences on brain development at the neuronal level.

Along with the breakthrough scientific insights, this dance video convinces with its professional video graphic design, rhythmic music, and excellent dance performance skills. In an interview, Antonia Groneberg, tells that many of her colleagues at the Lisbon-based Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, including their families, were involved in the production of the dance video.³ Eventually, this engagement paid off as they won the 2019 edition of the contest.

Utilizing Remote Sensing to Detect Tree Decline

Samuli Junttila is a Finnish researcher at the University of Eastern Finland who focuses on the intersection of geoinformation and forest management. He won the Physics category of the contest in 2020. I personally appreciate that this contribution is not only a professionally made dance video but that it comes up with a rhythmic rap song in the Finnish language as well.

In his contribution, he thematized the use of remote sensing methods for the purpose of tree decline anticipation and monitoring. As a result of climate change, many forests are being confronted with additional hazards as pest insects coming from other geographic areas or heat stress which might even result in forest fires. To counteract these developments, a detailed detection of the forest’s structures would be useful.

In the course of his Ph.D. research, Samuli Junttila developed a method to analyze the structure of tree crowns and estimate the leaf properties by utilizing the Multispectral LiDAR technology. This technology is basically a remote scanner that operates with >300,000 light pulses per second.

Conclusion

Whereas the contest’s overall prize of $1000 seems to me rather symbolic, both the project’s underlying message and fun factor are immeasurable. All Dance Your Ph.D. videos foster the idea of accessible science and epitomize the beauty of combined creativity and knowledge. The initiator of the Dance Your Ph.D. contest is Jon Bohannon, a scientist himself. He came up with the idea when he was struggling to understand the point of his conversational partner, as he outlined in his TEDx Talk entitled Dance Vs. PowerPoint, A Modest Proposal.

Further contributions

• Katharina Hanika: Biochemical & Biophysical Studies of the COVID-19 Nucleocapsid Protein with RNA (Biology) Video→
• Heather Masson-Forsythe: Belly ‘Dance your PhD’ 2019/2020 WINNER: Plant disease susceptibility genes (Biology) Video→
• Markéta Tomková: Cancer, mutations, and DNA modifications (Biology) Video →

Resources

Website Of The Dance Your Ph.D. contest.
¹ Wikipedia: Dance Your Ph.D.
² Wikipedia: Science (journal)
³ rbb24: Neurowissenschaftlerin Antonia Groneberg