Capturing the Movements of Dancers Has Wide Applications

In the autumn of 2011, when Praneeth Namburi PhD ’16 was a graduate student at MIT, he recalls “stumbling into a room full of people dancing.” Which is how Namburi took his first lesson with the MIT Ballroom Dance Team — by accident. “The instructor just put me in front of a partner,” he said. Yet despite his serendipitous introduction, Namburi chose to go back week after week, first as a respite from the rigors of his degree in experimental neuroscience and then, when he got deeper into it, “as a way of exploring and understanding how my body works.”