Dance Your Ph.D.
Dance contest for scientists, sponsored by AAAS
Dance Your Ph.D. is a contest wherein scientists express their research through dance. The purpose of the contest is to educate by explaining complex theories through interpretive dance. The contest was first held in 2008. Dance Your Ph.D. is sponsored by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Science magazine, and Primer.ai, an artificial intelligence technology company.
Origins
Dance Your Ph.D. is an international science competition founded by John Bohannon, who studies microbiology and artificial intelligence, is a former contributing correspondent for Science, and the current Director of Science for Primer.ai. Bohannon explained that the idea for Dance Your Ph.D. began at a New Year's Eve party that was "heavy on scientist attendees and light on the dancing." To get people up and moving, he turned the party into a dance contest where the attendees had to explain the research project they were working on without using words.
Dance Your Ph.D. started as a live event at the IMP Vienna in 2008. From across Europe, scientists gathered to watch their colleagues explain their Ph.D. thesis with interpretive dance. A Ph.D. or Doctor of Philosophy is the highest academic degree awarded in a course of study. Candidates pursuing a Ph.D. are required to engage in applied or original research to test a theory and to add to the existing body of knowledge in their particular discipline or field of study.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dance Your Ph.D.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.