Scan All Fishes #553

Adam Summers is a professor in the Department of Biology and the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences at the University of Washington and his office and lab are at the Friday Harbor Laboratories. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he worked on skeletal tissues in cartilaginous fishes. His post-doctoral work was as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley working on the functional morphology of amphibians. His research is heavily collections based and he holds a research associate position at the Los Angeles County Museum and an adjunct curatorial postion at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. He spent eight years at the University of California at Irvine as the director of the comparative biomechanics lab before joining the University of Washington faculty. Current research topics include the biomaterials from the sea, bioinspired filtration, attachment to fouled surfaces and defensive weaponry. He has authored more than 120 peer reviewed publications and for many years he wrote a monthly column in Natural History Magazine - "Biomechanics", to bring comparative biomechanics to a wider audience. His recent interest in scientific images as art has been featured at the Seattle Aquarium, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and museums in Korea, China and Slovenia, and reported on by more than 30 news outlets from 14 countries.