Indian researcher in US wins international Dance Your PhD contest

A young Indian researcher in the US has transported her experimental work in the laboratory to an artistic dance and won the international ‘Dance Your PhD’ contest in Chemistry category for the year.

Ambalika Khadria, a biochemistry PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, demonstrated her experiment on whether proteins are linked together in
pairs.

Khadria, who is from Delhi, managed this with a dance display jazzed up by coloured masks, dancers and fluorescent lights. The results of the contest were announced last week.

The ‘Dance Your PhD’ competition is a unique contest sponsored by Science magazine. Students across the world use interpretative dance to explain their PhD research topics.

Participants are required to upload a video of their dance accompanied with a written explanation for the viewer.

“My research is towards the larger goal of being able to control bacterial growth in these times of ever-evolving multidrug resistant bacteria. My dance illustrates an experimental protocol that has been developed in the laboratory,” Khadaria sa