Finnish researcher Jakub Kubecka won Dance Your PhD contest this year with a rap-based dance inspired by his work on the physics of atmospheric molecular clusters.
The global pandemic has devastated most of our plans for 2020, but it can not stop graduate students around the world from undertaking their dissertation research to dance, and submit videos held in accordance with local COVID-19 restrictions. With a little help from his friends, Ivo Neefjes and Vitus Besel, Jakub Kubecka, a Finnish graduate student, won with a rap-based dance on the physics of atmospheric molecular clusters. Kubecka included computer animation and drone recordings and outscored 40 other contestants to achieve the best honors, as well as win the physics category.
As we reported earlier, the Dance Your PhD contest was founded in 2008 by science journalist John Bohannon. It was previously sponsored by the journal Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and is now sponsored by the AI company Primer, where Bohannon is director of science. Bohannon told Slate in 2011 that he came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to defend a group of stressed doctoral students amidst their theses to let off some steam. Therefore, he put together a dance party at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Austria, including a contest for which candidates could best explain their dissertation topics with interpretive dance.
The match was such a hit that Bohannon received emails asking when the next match would be – and Dance Your PhD has continued ever since. It is now in its thirteenth year. There are four broad categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science, with a fairly liberal interpretation of what topics fall under each.
Over the years, the quality of the videos has improved a bit – Bohannon recalled that the first year’s winning video only haunted a postdoc that haunted a few graduates to demonstrate mouse genetics. The overall winner now gets $ 2,000 (a handsome amount for most students in the degree program), along with a bit of geek glorification, with the individual category winners achieving $ 750 each. The winner of the COVID-19 dance is gone with $ 500.
According to Kubecka, he co-wrote the music for his video with Neefjes and Besel and initially gave up the prospect of singing / rapping himself. “To prepare myself for the recording of the lyrics, I played the music with headphones all month to get the music in my blood,” he said. “I think I even dreamed about it.” After the music was recorded, and the dance was choreographed, they had to get permission to film the accompanying video – just as the situation of the COVID-19 in Finland deteriorated.
They changed their plans so that the trio would never be in the same room with more than two extra people (an actor and a cameraman) for the indoor recordings. However, they performed a large portion of the video outside. “In our infinite wisdom, we decided that we would only wear short – sleeved shirts through the video, for which the Finnish winter weather made us suffer,” Kubecka said. “Every outdoor shot started with us just throwing our jackets off the screen, performing the choreography and then running to get our jackets back.” The radar at the local Finnish Meteorological Institute also occasionally interfered with the rumble signal (“sometimes it just flies away to the Baltic Sea”). But they persevered, and now they have $ 2500 prize money to show for it.
In the remaining categories, Fanon Julienne, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Le Mans in France, won the biology prize with her dance illustrating her dissertation entitled “Fragmentation of plastics: effect of the environment and the nature of the polymer on the size “and the shape of generated fragments. ‘Recent MIT PhD Mikael Minier, now a software engineer at WaveXR in Los Angeles, California, won the Chemistry Award for his interpretation of his dissertation on’ Biomimetic Carboxylate-Bridged Diiron Complexes: From Solution Behavior to Modeling the Secondary Coordination Sphere. ” Magdalena Dorner-Pau, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Graz in Austria, won the Social Sciences Prize for a dissertation entitled “Playful (De) Scribers: Examination of performative methods for the promotion of descriptive skills of children in linguistically diverse elementary school classes using the image description example. “
In terms of the COVID-19 research award, Heather Masson Forsythe, a graduate student at Oregon State University, won the category with an interpretive dance – she performed solo on a beach, in the hallway outside her lab and in the forest, among others in the area. —Inspired by her thesis research on “Biochemical & Biophysical Studies of the COVID-19 Nucleocapsid Protein with RNA.” Forsythe uses nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging to learn about one of the essential proteins encoded in the viral genome. The protein “plays critical roles in several processes of the infection cycle, including the protection and packaging of viral RNA while a virus is being assembled,” she explained in her description. “Presumably, drug treatments can target and disrupt the interactions of the N protein with RNA, which can disrupt virus buildup and replication.”
Dance your PhD 2021: Biochemical and biophysical studies of the COVID-19 Nucleocapsid protein with RNA.
List by YouTube / Simu Group Helsinki