The listing recognised the engagement work itself, rather than a single song. Science and the People, Dr WELI's public-engagement programme, was shortlisted from Australia and named in the Top 30 of Falling Walls Engage 2025. It tested an argument, that one viral science work is not enough, and the prize gave that argument a hearing. WildWooHoo Studio formed afterwards to do the ongoing work the programme described.
Prize
Science engagement has few shared yardsticks. Falling Walls Engage offers one. The Berlin-based Falling Walls Foundation runs it each year as its prize for projects that connect science and society, asking which work brought research to broad publics and naming a Top 30 from the entries received. Science and the People was among them in 2025.
Rubric
What the jury rewards is published and weighted. The public Falling Walls page sets out four criteria.
- Impact, 40 per cent.
- Innovation, 30 per cent.
- Approach, 20 per cent.
- Overall Impression, 10 per cent.
Impact carries the most weight, overall impression the least. The order is a quiet instruction to anyone pitching engagement work, lead with what changed for people, not with the artist behind it. The studio now writes grant briefs and pitches in that order.
Programme
Science and the People built on Kangaroo Time, the AAAS Dance Your PhD Global Winner 2024, and on the work that followed it through 2024 and 2025, including the opening plenary at the Encontro Anual de Etologia 2024 in Brazil and the ACT National Science Week programmes in 2024 and 2025. A song had reached people. The programme asked the harder question, what does it take to keep reaching them.
Its answer was a method rather than a moment. The proposal drew together behavioural ecology, queer creative practice, multilingual delivery and pop-cultural production, and treated community casting as part of the science rather than decoration. The Kangaroo Time dance styles came from a multicultural Canberra cast rather than professional choreography, and the programme proposed to keep designing with the communities the work represents.
When it was submitted, WildWooHoo Studio did not yet exist as a public entity. The programme was, in effect, the studio's argument for its own existence, an infrastructure to carry the work past any single release. The full proposal, with its methodology, case studies and wider thesis, lives on the Canva site Dr WELI built.
Open the full project site in a new tab ↗
After
The Top 30 listing changed how the studio works rather than what it claims. WildWooHoo Studio was formed, turning work that had run under Dr WELI's name into a registered entity, the ongoing structure the programme had argued for. Funder-facing copy now follows the rubric order, naming an impact outcome first and the artist biography last. Press circulation and platform figures are recorded the same way each time, and kept inside the relevant article rather than the pitch.
Limits
A Top 30 listing is recognition, not a measured outcome. It records that a jury found the programme worth naming among many, not that the work changed what anyone learned. The honesty cuts both ways: the prize gave the studio a reason to form, and the studio still has to prove the engagement does what the proposal said it would.