Scientists Dance Their PhD

November 21, 2008

Science magazine has just announced the winners of its "Dance Your Ph.D." contest, which called for professors and graduate students to perform interpretative dances illustrating their research. Now I have a minor complaint about this: All of the animal-related entries lost. Come on, science judges. Surely you could see the beauty in this dance about thymic nurse cells of chickens.

Or how about this entry on prairie voles?

And this dance explaining the evolution of a vertebrate sensory system will remind you of 1980's outdoor parties. (I don't think I've heard music like that since around 1988.)

So who did win? The professor category went to Vince LiCata, a biochemist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He won this category with the help of his graduate students. The foursome danced a slow and graceful double pas de deux, representing the interaction of pairs of hemoglobin molecules from his 1990 Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. thesis, "Resolving Pathways of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low Temperature Isoelectric Focusing of Asymmetric Mutant Hybrids." To study these molecules, LiCata had to cool them down and take pictures of them, a technique that was mirrored onstage by a long-bearded Old Man Winter periodically running by and pouring Styrofoam frost as another dancer ran by and snapped a shot of the proceedings.

The "Popular Choice" award went to Markita Landry, a half-Bolivian, half-French Canadian physics Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her online entry received 14,138 views and was particularly popular with male viewers. Landry used a tango to convey her thesis, "Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes." She is trying to understand how a protein called TelK bends DNA into hairpin loops. The mechanism makes for beautiful dance, with Landry bending like pliable DNA in her partner's arms.