Pairs of swing-dancing electrons do the Lindy Hop in "Superconductivity: The Musical," the winning video for this year's geektastic Dance Your PhD contest. Pramodh Yapa, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, Canada, beat out roughly 50 other entries for the interpretive dance based on his master's thesis, "Non-Local Electrodynamics of Superconducting Wires: Implications for Flux Noise and Inductance."

The Dance Your PhD contest was established in 2008 by science journalist John Bohannon and is sponsored by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Bohannon told Slate in 2011 that he came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to get a group of stressed-out PhD students in the middle of defending their theses to let off a little steam. So he put together a dance party at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, including a contest for whichever candidate could best explain their thesis topics with interpretive dance.

Science kicked in a free one-year subscription as a reward. It was such a hit that Bohannon started getting emails asking when the next such contest would be—and Dance Your PhD has continued ever since. There are four broad categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science, with a fairly liberal interpretation of what topics fall under each.

Over the years, the quality of the videos has improved a bit—Bohannon recalled the first year's winning video just had a postdoc chasing after a couple of graduates to demonstrate mouse genetics—as have the prizes offered. The overall winner now gets $1,000 (a princely sum for most grad students), along with a bit of geek glory, with the individual category winners snagging $500 each.

A dance of superconductivity

YouTube/Pramodh Yapa

YouTube/Pramodh Yapa

YouTube/Pramodh Yapa

YouTube/Pramodh Yapa

YouTube/Pramodh Yapa

YouTube/Pramodh Yapa

YouTube/Pramodh Yapa

Yapa's research deals with how matter behaves when it's cooled to very low temperatures, when quantum effects kick in—such as certain metals becoming superconductive, or capable of conducting electricity with zero resistance. That's useful for any number of practical applications. D-Wave Systems, for example, is building quantum computers using loops of superconducting wire. For his thesis, "I had to use the theory of superconductivity to figure out how to build a better quantum computer," said Yapa.

Condensed matter theory (the precise description of Yapa's field of research) is a notoriously tricky subfield to make palatable for a non-expert audience. "There isn't one unifying theory or a single tool that we use," he said. "Condensed matter theorists study a million different things using a million different techniques."

"You can imagine electrons as a free gas, which means they don't interact with each other."

His conceptual breakthrough came about when he realized electrons were a bit like "unsociable people" who find joy when they pair up with other electrons. "You can imagine electrons as a free gas, which means they don't interact with each other," he said. "The theory of superconductivity says they actually form pairs when cooled below a certain temperature. That was the 'Eureka!' moment, when I realized I could totally use swing dancing."

He wrote the music and choreographed the dance steps in just six weeks and shot the video during the Canadian equivalent of spring break. Yapa has played guitar for nearly 13 years and also played ukulele and bass. He started writing and recording his own music several years ago and also started taking swing-dancing classes. "Everyone in my video are just friends from the swing dancing community. And some physicists," he said. So the contest was a natural fit for his various hobbies.

Yapa also won the physics category. You can check out the dance videos of the other three category winners; all four were featured at the AAAS annual meeting this past weekend in Washington, DC.

Olivia Gosseries of the University of Liege in Belgium won the biology category with a dance based on her thesis, "Measuring consciousness after severe brain injury using brain stimulation." Shari Finner of Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands won the chemistry category by dancing out her thesis, "Percolation theory—conducting plastics." And Roni Zohar of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel won the social science category with a dance based on the thesis, "Movements as a door for learning physics concepts: integrating embodied pedagogy in teaching."

Listing image by YouTube/Pramodh Yapa