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So You Think You Can Conduct Original Research?

2014's Dance your PhD prize goes to Georgia U biologist on flying trapeze

This year's Dance your PhD winner has taken a different slant – no, “angle” is a better word – on the now-infamous competition: Uma Nagendra has taken to the flying trapeze ropes to beat off a strong field to take the prize.

Her entry (video below) covers a topic that doesn't intuitively lend itself to dance, namely how ecosystems recover from natural disasters. The University of Georgia researcher chose tornadoes for her work, titled Plant-soil feedbacks after severe tornado damage, which examines the interaction between new tree seedlings and pathogens in the soil. Seedlings that sprout too close to the parent tree have a greater chance of infection. That means spreading further afield into a survival advantage if the parent tree is alive.

However, if the parent is taken out by a disaster, the soil is more exposed to the sun, and is dryer. That means the pathogens are less active, allowing better regrowth in the damaged area.

Nagendra won both the overall competition and the Biology category. Other category winners included Hans Rinderknecht of MIT (Physics cateogory, dancing how light triggers nuclear fusion); for Chemistry, Saioa Alvarez of the University of the Basque Country in Leioa, Spain looked at lipids to dance out the behaviour of emulsions like mayonnaise to their own music; and Social Science also went to Spain, with David Manzano Cosano of the Complutense University of Madrid presenting the “history of technology and colonialism in the Pacific”.

The Science Magazine announcement is here. ®

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