Adam Summers is a professor in the department of Biology and in the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he worked on new tissues from cartilaginous fishes. His post-doctoral work on the functional morphology of amphibians was as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley. He was then hired at the University of California - Irvine as assistant, then associate professor with tenure in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as well as Bioengineering. He now runs the comparative biomechanics and biomaterials lab at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs. Current research topics include the evolution and mechanical properties of cartilage and tendon, swimming mechanics of sharks, respiratory patterns of sharks and rays and solid-solid interactions in aquatic organisms. This work has led to more than 90 publications and two patents. He has consulted on films, television and for 8 years his monthly column in Natural History Magazine – ‘Biomechanics’, brought comparative biomechanics to a wider audience. A broad collaboration with a group of poets has led to an exhibit of large format prints of fish anatomy that have been seen by more than 1 million visitors at the Seattle Aquarium and soon at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.