Growing up playing music — and helping out in his grandmother’s bakery — Moss learned to see errors as “hiccups,” little, inconsequential blips. That mentality helps him in the lab, too. One day, he spilled a day’s work into a drawer. Instead of agonizing over the lost work, he mopped up his experiment and kept moving.

Still, going back and forth between his two lives has been challenging. “How you engage with those communities is so different,” Moss said. In the lab, instructions are well-documented and precise. In the dance studio, plain instruction is not always enough. (“There’s no, I raised my femur by 15 degrees”). Instead, when learning a new move like the kip-up — a Slinky-like leap from supine to standing by pushing off the hands — Moss shopped around for different explanations, cobbling together one that worked for him.

He uses the same eclectic approach when teaching. With his dance and chemistry students, Moss explores concepts with both visual and technical explanations. For example, in the introductory undergraduate chemistry course where he is a teaching fellow, he shoots his hand forward to demonstrate how hard nucleophiles — a type of chemical species — move like lasers. Then he imitates cascading water to show how soft nucleophiles flow like waterfalls. “It seemed a lot to me like choreography,” he said. “Sure, it’s a movement of electrons or atoms, but it’s still movement on this smaller-than-the-eye level.”

At the end of this year, Moss will leave Urbanity Dance to spend more time in the lab. But he won’t leave dance behind. This past fall, he was selected for a one-year fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where he leads post-show talks and facilitates seminars with choreographers. He freelances, too. In December, he performed a duet called “The Flared Place” at the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Festival of Lights” that portrayed the balance of light and dark in Jewish history.

Moss is also working with a group of five other Harvard graduate students, both dancers and musicians, to explore the concept of “responsible partnering.” “How much pressure you’re putting on another person and how much you’re receiving,” he explained. That pressure could come as sound volume or human weight or both: As one of the dancers, Moss will wear a sound suit embedded with tiny sensors that bleat louder under heavier force.

Eventually, Moss wants to build his own “responsible partnership” between his two loves, replacing kitschy attempts to fuse science and art with choreography loyal to technical concepts.

“If the art is just something pretty to look at,” Moss said, “then it’s not really of any value.”