Dancing with the scientists

Dance Your PhD is an annual competition that challenges doctoral students in science to explain their research findings through choreography. Each year, dozens of young scientists submit videos of their elaborate dances on topics like supersymmetry, group coordination in meerkats and dynamic control of chiral space.
Uma Nagendra won the competition in 2014 with her entry “Plant-soil feedbacks after severe tornado damage.” And John Bohannon is the creator of Dance Your PhD, as well as a reporter for the journal “Science.”
Kurt Andersen: John, where did this idea come from?
John Bohannon: It was a drunken New Year’s Eve party in Vienna, Austria. I wanted to get a bunch of scientists to dance. We had a party and I just had this sense that it was going to be dull. But I knew that they were really competitive and most of them were PhD students. So I came up with this idea of forcing them to dance by making them compete with each other to explain their work without using words.
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