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Introducing Make's Fascination series: Adam Summers' Fascination with Sharks! Editor and Publisher Dale Dougherty writes:
What fascinates you about science and technology? Do you remember something that caught your interest as a kid and fascinated you? What fascinates you today in the work you do? These are basic questions that get at how we're personally motivated to explore, learn and ultimately create new ideas. I wanted to ask a group of scientists and technologists these questions and present their answers in this Fascination video series. I hope you find them and their stories as fascinating as I do.
This summer, O'Reilly organized an event with Google and Nature called SciFoo where scientists from around the world are invited to a open-ended, unstructured event on the Google Campus in Mountain View, California. At SciFoo, I interviewed a dozen or so scientists and/or technologists across a range of disciplines and interests. I wanted to know what fascinated them as a child and how that might be connected to work they do today. Each one of them demonstrates the truth of Emerson's maxim: "Nothing great is achieved without enthusiasm."
The first interview in the series is Adam Summers who works in the field of Comparative Biomechanics, a field he didn't know existed when he graduated from college. He didn't even graduate in biology. It wasn't until he found himself collecting fish on the Great Barrier Reef as a self-proclaimed "bum" that he discovered that he wanted to become a biologist. Now, "I'm interested in how sharks swim fast." Sharks don't have a rigid skeletal structure like bony fishes. "Comparative Biomechanics is one of those fields at the interface" between disciplines, says Adam.
Fascination with Sharks: Adam Summers.
