Dance Your Ph.D. Contest Winners

The winners of the annual AAAS Science Dance contest were just announced, and they are a lot of fun. Three of the four categories were won by women scientists:

The Graduate Student winner is Sue Lynn Lau, who is working on her Ph.D. at Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia. She interpreted her thesis, "The role of vitamin D in beta-cell function" in a sort-of ballet. Lau "appears as the Sugarplum Fairy, delivering marshmallow glucose to four beta cell dancers. Meanwhile, a fifth dancer flings and twirls around the stage--representing the sunlight required for vitamin D biosynthesis." Read the full description of her thesis.


The Post-Doc winner is Miriam Sach, who completed her PhD, "Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography. AS comparison between single subject and group analysis", at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany in 2004. She is currently a post-doc at UC San Diego. Read more about her research.


Finally, the Popular Choice winner was graduate student Markita Landry's "Sinle Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes". Landry expects to complete here thesis at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in 2011. Read more about her research.


Watch all the Runner-Up and other contestants' videos.

(via Podblack)
Tags: AAAS Science Dance Contest, video