Drag queen helps kangaroo researcher win Dance Your PhD contest

A kangaroo researcher who brought together drag queens, ballerinas and a bhangra dancer for a rave-up in the outback to highlight the distinct personalities of marsupials has won the annual Dance Your PhD competition.

Weliton Menário Costa, a research officer at the Australian National University, took the coveted title for his energetic interpretation of his 2021 PhD thesis filmed in Wilsons Promontory National Park on the southern tip of Australia.

Set to his debut single, a high tempo song called Kangaroo Time, the winning video sees Dr Menário Costa dance at sunset alongside other dancers in what Science calls an “unchoreographed mishmash of steps, leaps, twirls, and twerks that reflect his research on the distinct personalities of eastern grey kangaroos”.

Some kangaroos, for example, might approach a car driven near them, while others shy away.

Dr Menário Costa’s work explains how the marsupials also modify their behaviour to conform with those around them, adjusting as they move between groups.

The video mirrors the mix of individuality and conformity in kangaroos and seeks to celebrate the value of diversity in all species, explained the Brazil-born researcher.

“Kangaroos are different, just like us,” he said. “Differences happen in all species – that’s what makes science, art, and communities great.”

Commending the “sense of surprise and delight” in the dance, judge Alexa Meade said many of the winning entries used dance to explain a number of scientific concepts.

“This year’s entries did a great job of incorporating art and science to [create something] greater than the sum of their parts,” said Ms Meade, adding that, in the past, “some entries have incredible research but the dance component feels like an afterthought, or we might get some incredible dance performance, but I’m not sure what it has to do with science. It has to be a blending that accentuates both.”

Dr Menário Costa, who took his PhD in ecology from ANU, will pocket $2,750 (£2,170) for his dance, which also won the social science category.

Three other category winners won $750 each in this 16th edition of Science’s dance contest. They include Siena Dumas Ang, from Princeton University, who triumphed in the biology category for her dance on the “epigenetics of early life adversity”, chemistry winner Xuebing Zhang, from City University of Hong Kong, on “circadian clock communication between different cells”, and physics winner Layla El-Khoury, from North Carolina State University, whose PhD focused on streambank erosion in Virginia and North Carolina.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com