It is time once more to honor the winners of the annual Dance Your PhD contest, the place keen younger scientists try to convey the ideas of their doctoral theses by means of dance. This yr’s overall winner is the College of Helsinki’s Sulo Roukka, who researches chemesthesis, particularly how folks expertise completely different sensory meals compounds like capsaicin (scorching) or menthol (cool).

As we’ve reported previously, the Dance Your PhD contest was established in 2008 by science journalist John Bohannon, who’s now an information scientist at South Park Commons. Bohannon told Slate in 2011 that he got here up with the concept whereas making an attempt to determine the way to get a bunch of stressed-out PhD college students, who had been in the course of defending their theses, to let off a bit steam. So he put collectively a dance get together at Austria’s Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, together with a contest for whichever candidate might greatest clarify their thesis subjects by means of interpretive dance.

The competition was such successful that Bohannon began getting emails asking when the subsequent one can be—and Dance Your PhD has continued ever since. It is now in its seventeenth yr. There are 4 broad classes: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science, with a reasonably liberal interpretation of what subjects fall beneath every. All class winners obtain $750. Roukka received the chemistry class and, as the general champion, will obtain an extra $2,750.

This yr’s sponsor is Sandbox AQ, an AI firm specializing in massive quantitative fashions. The 2025 competitors additionally included a particular $750 prize for dances associated to AI and quantum science, received by Arfor Houwman of the College of Innsbruck for his dance video explaining the physics of laser cooling and ultracold atoms. Bohannon famous that the winners had been all European scientists. “This yr, American scientists didn’t appear to be within the temper to bounce,” he told Science. “Fortunate for the world, Europe’s scientists have doubled their creativity and enthusiasm.”