It's not your usual dreary lecture: one of the world's leading researchers into kangaroos has made a funky disco video mimicking the marsupials' actions.
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It's so good that it's now won a global prize for communicating science in a popular way.
The video "Kangaroo Time" by ANU researcher Weliton Menario Costa is in the camp-as-a-row-of-tents style of the great movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
In it, Dr Menario Costa mimics the marsupials' actions to a disco beat. He's helped by a troop of dancers from different cultures.
The original and club mixes have been played more than 7,000 times on Spotify. The song has throbbed from speakers in clubs, festivals and radios.
Dr Menario Costa has now won the global Dance Your PhD competition. The brief to researchers from the American organisers of the global competition was to explain their PhD in engaging ways.
It's not a Nobel Prize but it's probably more fun. "Winning this contest is the equivalent of winning Eurovision for me," Dr Menario Costa said.
"I think it not only shows the incredible might of the research conducted here in Australia, but also how creative we are as a nation. Even us scientists!" he said.
The ANU researcher is known in the music and dance world as WELI for his performance and song-writing, or Dr WELI, as he says.
He chose to meld his two skills - top research and dance music - to produce the video which is both fabulously entertaining and informative about the behaviour of kangaroos - how they use their claws, for example.
He is originally from Brazil and the video draws on his Brazilian roots.
He also hopes it will promote diversity and tolerance.
"As a queer immigrant from a linguistically diverse developing country, I understand the challenges of feeling disconnected in certain environments," he said.
"I think it's extremely important that we celebrate diversity and creating a video explaining kangaroo personality was an excellent medium for me to do this."
Dr Menario Costa - WELI - left Brazil for the ANU in 2017 to do his PhD in animal behaviour at the university's Research School of Biology. He is now a Visiting Fellow at the ANU.
To gain his PHD, he spent more than three years studying a group of more than 300 wild eastern grey kangaroos in Victoria.
"We found that kangaroos like to socialise in groups but prefer smaller social circles. Like humans, kangaroo personalities manifest early in life. Mothers and their offspring have similar personalities, and so do siblings," he said.
"Kangaroos are very socially aware and will adjust their behaviour based off cues from other roos."
He found that human dancers from different backgrounds were ideal to mimic kangaroo behaviour.
"The diversity of the dancers, from classical ballet to twerking, and the urban street dancers to the Brazilian dancing styles, reflect the variations in kangaroo personality across the full spectrum, from bolder types to shier roos."
"The use of kangaroo time is not just to explain my research studying kangaroo personality - it's also about my time living and studying in Australia as a whole," he said.
"Working on this project was the spark I needed to encourage me to take that next step with my music. It's made me realise I want to focus on my music for the next little while and put my scientific career on the backburner.
"Speaking of which, I'm about to release a new EP called 'Yours Academically, Dr WELI'!"
Steve Evans
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
