Meet this year’s winners of the Dance Your PhD competition

The global pandemic has ruined most of our plans for 2020, but it hasn’t been able to stop graduate students around the world from putting their theses into dance, by submitting videos produced in strict compliance with local COVID-19 restrictions. . With a little help from his friends Ivo Neefjes and Vitus Besel, Jakub Kubecka, a Finnish graduate student, won the competition with a rap-based dance on the physics of atmospheric molecular clusters. Incorporating computer animation and drone imagery, Kubecka beat 40 other contestants to take top honors (and win the physical category).

As previously reported, the Dance Your PhD competition was created 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 the AI ​​company Primer, where Bohannon is the director of science. Bohannon told Slate in 2011 he got the idea while trying to figure out how to get a group of stressed out PhD students in the midst of defending their theses to let off steam for a bit. So he organized a dance party at the Austrian Institute for Molecular Biotechnology, including a competition for the candidate who could best explain the topics of his thesis with an interpretive dance.

The contest was such a success that Bohannon started getting emails asking when the next one would be – and Dance Your PhD has been going on ever since. He is now in his thirteenth year. There are four main categories: physics, chemistry, biology and social sciences, with a fairly liberal interpretation of the subjects that fall under each.

Over the years the quality of the videos improved a bit – Bohannon recalled that the first year winning video just had a postdoc chasing a few graduates to demonstrate mouse genetics – just like the prices offered. The overall winner now receives $ 2,000 (a princely sum for most graduate students), along with a bit of geek glory, with the winners in each category taking home $ 750 each. The winner of the COVID-19 dance waltzed with $ 500.

According to Kubecka, he co-wrote the music for his video with Neefjes and Besel and was initially hesitant about singing / rapping himself. “To get ready to record the lyrics, I was running with headphones playing music at least 30 times a day for the whole month to put it in my blood,” he said. “I think I even dreamed of it.” After the music was recorded and the dance choreographed, the team had to obtain permission to film the accompanying video, just as the COVID-19 situation in Finland worsened.

The trio changed their plans to never be in the same room with more than two additional people (an actor and a cameraman) for the indoor footage. However, they played a good portion of the video outdoors. “In our infinite wisdom, we had decided to wear only short-sleeved shirts throughout the video, which the Finnish winter weather made us suffer for,” Kubecka said. “Every outdoor shot started with us throwing our jackets right next to the screen, performing the choreography, and then running to retrieve our jackets.” The local Finnish Meteorological Institute’s radar also occasionally interfered with the drone’s signal (“sometimes it just flew off to the Baltic Sea”). But they persevered, and now they have $ 2,500 in prizes to show for their efforts.

In the remaining categories, Fanon Julienne, postdoc at the University of Le Mans in France, won the biology prize with his dance illustrating his thesis, entitled “Fragmentation of plastics: effect of the environment and the nature of the polymer on the size and shape of the fragments generated. “MIT’s recent PhD Mikael Minier, now a software engineer at WaveXR in Los Angeles, Calif., won the chemistry prize for his interpretation of his thesis on” Carboxylate-bridged diiron complexes biomimetics: from the behavior of the solution to the modeling of the secondary coordination sphere ”. Magdalena Dorner-Pau, post-doctoral fellow 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 divers school elementary classes using example from image description. “

Regarding the COVID-19 research award, Oregon State University graduate student Heather Masson Forsythe won this category with an interpretive dance – performed solo on a beach, in the hallway outside from his laboratory and in the woods, among others. —Inspired by her research thesis on “Biochemical and Biophysical Studies of COVID-19 Core Protein with RNA”. Forsythe uses nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging to learn more about one of the essential proteins encoded in the viral genome. This protein “plays a critical role in multiple processes in the infection cycle, including the protection and packaging of viral RNA during virus assembly,” she explained in her description. . “Likely drug treatments could target and disrupt N protein interactions with RNA, thereby disrupting virus construction and replication.”

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