Kangaroo Diversity Wins This Year’s Dance Your PhD Competition – The Scholarly Kitchen

By inergency On Mar 8, 2024

Founded by John Bohannon (yes, that John Bohannon), the Dance Your PhD Contest has been around since 2008, offering science graduate students a way to explain their research creatively and perhaps more importantly, to blow off steam and have some fun. This year’s winner, Weliton Menário Costa of the Australian National University, seems to have stacked the deck a bit in his favor, by not only selecting a research project that’s both interesting and visually compelling, but also by composing and producing the song in his entry. “Kangaroo Time (Club Mix) explores Costa’s thesis, “Personality, Social Environment, and Maternal-level Effects: Insights from a Wild Kangaroo Population.” This is way more interesting than the dance number that would have accompanied my PhD thesis, which would have consisted of one stressed out person repeatedly pipetting clear liquids into plastic tubes.

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.