Science Magazine announced its 9th annual Dance Your PhD Contest — a competition for best explaining your PhD research in an interpretive dance.
On a scale of 0 to 100, how cool is this, a PhD in an interpretive dance? I’d give it no less than a 90.
Unfortunately the contest is open to science majors only: the prize categories are Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Social Sciences, as detailed here. I wish we had this in computer science and engineering. Not that I am a great dancer myself (I am a terrible dancer …. could I swim, bike, and run my PhD instead?), but I am in awe of the artistic creativity that these dances demonstrate.
Maybe Communications of the ACM would be up for sponsoring this, for computing / engineering disciplines? In 2014 a UIUC engineer managed to squeeze into this contest’s Physics category with a dance of humans and drones. In an ACM Dance Your PhD Contest, we’d probably see so many robotic dances, we’d probably have to create different prize categories, for different robots and different ratios of dancing humans to dancing robots. Wouldn’t that be fun?
About Maria Gorlatova
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is the Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Her research centers on pervasive computing technologies, with a focus on spatial computing and next-generation augmented reality. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named one of the N2Women Rising Stars and has received multiple awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
