The results are in, and the winner of the 7th annual Dance Your PhD competition is Uma Nagendra of the University of Georgia.
Nagendra's own home city of New Orleans, Louisiana, was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As the human residents put their lives back together, she became curious about how the natural world recovers from disasters. After she became a biology Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia in 2011, she realized that she could answer this question herself by gathering data out in the field. But destructive events like Hurricane Katrina are rare on the timescale of a Ph.D. So Nagendra focused on a natural disaster that occurs far more frequently and does more localized damage: tornadoes.
Negendra is not only a scientist -she’s also a circus aerialist, so she recruited her circus friends to perform with her in the video that explains her dissertation. You might say she had a leg up in that department. Nagendra was the overall winner and the winner of the Biology category. Continue reading to see the winners in the Physics, Chemustry, and Social Sciences categories.
Reduced Fat Mayonnaise
Saioa Alvarez is getting his PhD in Food Science and Technology at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. His dance about mayonnaise was named the winner in the Chemistry category.
In The Ring: A Fusion Odyssey
Hans Rinderknecht of MIT was the winner in the Physics category for a dance about his dissertation entitled "Studies of non-hydrodynamic processes in Inertial Confinement Fusion implosions on OMEGA and the NIF.” Alrighty then.
The “Discovery" of the Pacific
The winner in the Social Science category was David Manzano of the University Complutense of Madrid in Spain.
This PhD focuses on the international relationships that Spain establishes with other empires in the frontiers of its colonies in the so-called “Hispanic Oceania”, that is to say, Philippines, Marianas and the Caroline Islands.
You can see all twelve finalists in this year's competition here. -via Buzzfeed