AstroAlert: Dance Your PhD winners announced

Hi everyone,

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The Dance Your Ph.D. contest began in 2008 as a way to encourage newly minted Ph.D. scientists to communicate their thesis research to the public through interpretive dance. It’s a fun and creative way to explain scientific discoveries in an accessible way for non-experts.

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This is the 11th year of the competition and the winners have just been announced. Top prize went to Pramodh Senarath Yapa, a doctoral student at the University of Alberta, who choreographed and wrote the songs for Superconductivity: The Musical! It’s a song and dance extravaganza that depicts the social lives of electrons. “You can imagine electrons as a free gas,” says Yapa, “which means they don’t interact with each other. The theory of superconductivity says they actually form pairs when cooled below a certain temperature. That was the ‘Eureka!’ moment, when I realized I could totally use swing dancing.”

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You can watch the winning video, which beat out 50 other submissions, below:

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http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZvUNIHxWic

There was only one astronomy-themed finalist this year, titled Probabilistic methods for cosmological analysis with uncertainty-dominated data. The dance aims to explain how noisy astrophysical data can still reveal important clues about the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that dominate the universe. You can watch the video below.

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