Former Canberra scientist Dr Weliton Menário Costa said it felt like winning Eurovision when he found out he had won the global “Dance Your PhD” competition for his quirky interpretation of kangaroo behaviour.
His four-minute video, titled Kangaroo Time, features drag queens, twerking, ballerinas, a classical Indian dancer, and a bunch of friends Costa made from his time studying at the Australian National University.
The video collected the top prize awarded annually by the American Association for the Advancement of ScienceScience magazine, and San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company Primer.ai.
The competition encourages scientists to explain complex research to the wider public through dance, music and humour, and attracts dozens of entries from around the world each year.
“It’s unbelievable,” Costa told the Guardian on Tuesday. “Winning an international science competition is like Eurovision – except we all have PhDs.
“It’s actually a real challenge, to communicate research results and make a clear link between science and the performing arts. In Eurovision you can do anything you want.”
Kangaroo Time narrowly beat an entry from the University of Maine, in which a second-year PhD student in ecology and environmental sciences used the music of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre to convey her research on the invasive brown-tailed moth.
Costa raised more than A$4,000 (US$2,750) and won the overall prize and the social sciences prize; it was the fourth time an Australian entry had won in the competition’s 17-year history.
In 2009, a University of Sydney entry won for a dance about the use of vitamin D to protect against diabetes. Two years later, a University of Western Australia entry won for a video on why orthopedic implants fail; and the following year a University of Sydney entry won again for work explaining the “evolution of nanostructural architecture in 7000 series aluminum alloys during strengthening by age hardening and severe plastic deformation”.
Costa based his entry on his four-year PhD study on animal behaviour, in a video Science magazine described as “joyful madness”. The judging panel of scientists, artists and dancers praised Kangaroo Time for its “sense of wonder and delight” and its accessible explanation of the science of marsupial group dynamics.
Using a remote-controlled car, the ANU graduate studied the behavioral differences and complex personalities of a group of more than 300 wild eastern gray kangaroos in Victoria.
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He found that like humans, kangaroos’ personalities develop early in life and often mirror the personalities of their parents and siblings; he found that they take social cues from the group dynamic, and also form social circles like people.
His conclusion: “Difference leads to diversity. It exists within any given species, it’s just natural.”
The Brazilian-born biologist, who won a scholarship from ANU in 2017, said he drew on his South American roots and a fascination with Australia’s unique fauna to write, produce and perform in the work.
Costa, a foreign immigrant from a developing country, said he could relate to how the kangaroos changed their behavior to fit in with the wider group.
“I come from a very humble family, a small town where most people are not educated,” he said of his conservative upbringing. “When I came to Australia, I came out to my family… in Kangaroo Time I celebrate diversity in my beautiful Canberra community which [mirrors] kangaroo behavior.”
Since completing his PhD in Canberra in 2021, Costa, who goes by the name WELI to his friends, has abandoned his academic science career and moved his home base to Sydney, where he wants to establish himself as a singer-songwriter.
Later this year he plans to release his first EP called Yours Academically, Dr WELI.
