Dance Your Ph.D.: One Month till the Duedate!

There is one month to go to submit to the 2010 "Dance Your Ph.D" Contest! Entries are due by September 1st. My lab previously won in the Professor category, so I get to be one of the judges for the 2010 contest. This is our dance from the 2009 contest:

And what we won was: a real dance! Jenn Liang Chaboud, a real choreographer in Chicago, created a dance based on one of our lab's publications in JBC, here is the dance she created:

This is Science: Jenn Liang Chaboud from Red Velvet Swing on Vimeo.

The two muscular guys are Klenow and Klentaq DNA polymerases, the women are all DNA.

THIS YEAR's CONTEST:
This time, instead of doing student, postdoc, and professor categories they are doing discipline specific categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. Winners each get $500 and will have their videos screened at this year's Imagine Science Film Festival (ISFF) in New York.

This ongoing science-and-dance experiment was started by John Bohannon several years ago - starting at only one university and now going worldwide thanks to help and sponsorship from the AAAS (aka the journal Science). And now he's teamed up with Alexis Gambis of ISFF in what seems a natural collaboration.

How can you help support this experiment in science and the arts? SUBMIT!

Don't worry about technical quality of the video, don't worry about dance skills, don't worry about looking silly (look at our video) - this "contest"/experiment is about communicating science through one of the most esoteric of the arts. If science can be communicated through dance, then it most certainly can be communicated through plays, film, visual art, and (gasp) public lectures. It is a very exciting ongoing experiment - so go to gonzolabs and watch them and push through that activation barrier and submit something!