Duo honored by magazine for creative routine

A physicist reading Science magazine.

Nothing unusual about that.

A physicist dancing a tango that interprets her research on single-molecule biophysics.

Maybe a little out of the ordinary.

Markita Landry, a graduate student in physics at the University of Illinois, and Florin Bora, also a physics graduate student, recently won accolades in a contest called "Dance Your Ph.D." organized by Science magazine writer John Bohannon.

In the video they submitted, the two tango, with clasped hands, across a wooden floor. He takes a step forward, she takes a step back. He turns, she turns.

"What I was going for was the theory behind (the research) rather than the experiments itself," Landry said.

On most days Landry can be found in a soundproof basement room in Loomis Laboratory on campus. She studies the interactions between single molecules and is interested in a specific protein's interactions.

To work with the molecules, Landry uses very precise lasers, and to dance the tango, precision is required by the dancer following the leader, she said.

"It was more the precision and randomness that inspired the dance, rather than specific moves," she said.

Landry added a few other touches to the performance, like wearing a red dress. (She works with a red laser.)

Winners were announced at the end of November, and Landry won in the "popular choice" category. She and Bora will be attending the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February 2009 in Chicago where professional dancers will perform a dance choreographed to research in Landry's field.

Other winners included dance interpretations of, for example, "Tropospheric N2O isotopic composition: Instrumentation development and preliminary data for the constraint of the N2O global budget and stratospheric influence."

And "Individual Differences in Exploratory Behavior of Prairie Voles, Microtus ochrogaster."

Seriously.

"It's one of those great things: bringing art and science together," said Jenn Liang-Chaboud, a Chicago-based producer, dancer and choreographer who will be producing the event and choreographing one of the winning dances for the February performance. "Everyone has this intellectual curiosity about science and adding an artistic element to it feels like it fits very well," she said.

"Most people think it was a really great idea and thought it was pretty hilarious to see scientists dancing," Landry said.

Dancing, she admitted, is not normally an attribute people think lab scientists possess.

Given all the attention they have received since posting the video, "maybe we should have done more preparation," Bora said.

Landry learned about the recent contest while reading Science magazine earlier in the fall.

"It caught my eye because it was unique compared with what's usually in there. It was a spur of the moment kind of thing," she said.

She called up Bora and the two talked about ideas for about an hour, and after two takes, they posted the video on YouTube.

A Canadian with a South American mother, Landry grew up learning salsa, merengue and other Latin dances.

She has been dancing the tango since she joined a local group after she moved to Champaign-Urbana in the summer of 2006 to study physics at the UI.

"The dance itself is completely random and made up on the spot," she said.

Landry's winning secret? In addition to sending information to friends and family, she linked the video to different tango-related Web sites to build viewership that way.

Science magazine's Bohannon held a similar (but in-person) "Dance Your Ph.D." contest in January this year in Austria, and it was a hit, Liang-Chaboud said. Bohannon was in Sardinia Thursday and unavailable for comment.

Dancing may not be the most exact way to convey a scientific theory – say, compared with a peer-reviewed article published in a national scientific journal – but "it does make science more accessible to a large number of people," Landry said.

And she's all for that.

To see Landry's thesis in motion ("Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes") and other contest winners, visit http://gonzolabs.org/dance.