Sometimes the world of science is weird and wacky. And perhaps it doesn't get any wackier than during the annual Dance Your Ph.D contest where scientists take their research and turn it into interpretive dance.
That's right, scientists convert their hard data into art through dance.
This isn't just some amateur hour, though: the contest is overseen by John Bohannon, a correspondent for the journal Science. The contest also includes sponsors like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the HighWire Press. A panel of scientists, artists and educators choose winners at the end of each competition period based on both scientific and artistic merits.
This year's top prize winner, as well as the winner for the biology category of the competition, is Uma Nagendra, a student at the University of Georgia. Uma, who is also an acrobat, turned her skills into a prize-winning video that demonstrated her research about how tornadoes affect the ecology of forests.
Winners in other categories include Saioa Alvarez of the University of the Basque Country in Spain. He didn't dance, but instead, made a music video with an original song where he performed in a sumo fat suit to demonstrate his research involving the creation of a low-fat mayonnaise.
The social science category prize went to David Manzano Cosano of the Computense University of Madrid. His mosh-pit like dance showed the colonization of the Pacific.
Meanwhile, in the physics category, MIT's Hans Rinderknecht took the prize for a dance demonstration of his thesis, "Studies of Non-Hydrodynamic Processes in Inertial Confinement Fusion Implosions on OMEGA and the National Ignition Facility."
In the final "People's Choice" category, which won the award after an online vote, Venanzio Cichella of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign carefully choreographed a tango with two drones.
Winners of the Dance Your Ph.D don't just get bragging rights, though. Winners for each category receive $500, while the top prize gets $1000 plus a trip to Stanford University for an exclusive screening of their video.
If you want to see more videos from all 12 finalists, they are available here.
[Photo Credit: Uma Nagendra, Dance Your PH.D.]
