Brainiac boogie: Meet the 2016 winners of “Dance Your PhD”

Even academics have to get a little footloose and fancy free once in a while, and these are the ones who did it best in 2016’s “Dance Your PhD” contest. For nine years, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has been encouraging grad students to step outside the box of academic papers and presentations to bring their research to the masses through dance…and have a little fun. Here are a few of this year’s winners:

Featured Videos: The winning entry in the biology category comes from Carla Brown at the University of Glasgow, who illustrates the development of antibiotic resistance using glitter-covered modern dancers to represent infectious bacteria engaging in dance fights with antibiotics not seen since the first Zoolander. In the social sciences category, Margaret Danilovich of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine speeds up and slows down Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” as dancers progressively stiffen while popping and locking to show the effects of muscle loss during aging. Training caregivers to help their patients exercise, however, helps improve frailty and quality of life, the dance shows, resulting in a chair dance between a caregiver and an “elderly” patient at the end.

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