Graduate-level physics research and interpretive dance aren’t usually things we think of as being related, but that’s just the sort of perception that the annual Dance Your PhD Competition is trying to upend.
The contest is exactly what it sounds like: grad students try to explain their (often obscure) research using the (always obscure) medium of interpretive dance. What could be more entertaining?
With thesis topics like “Honeybee Robbing Behaviour” and “Nanosensing Protein Allostery and Peptide Interactions Using SERS,” you may not actually learn anything that you’ll actually understand. But most of the videos are quite goofy (in a good way), including this year’s winner, created by Joel Miller, a biomedical engineer at the University of Western Australia. His thesis topic? “Microstructure-Property Relationships in Ti2448 Components Produced by Selective Laser Melting.” Um, okay. But the video makes it look kind of fun.
Microstructure-Property relationships in Ti2448 components produced by Selective Laser Melting: A Love Story from Joel Miller on Vimeo.
