Adam Summers, 2025-2026 Fellow in Environmental Arts and Humanities, is a papa, a pilot, and a professor of biology at the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories. His research explores biomechanics, biomaterials, and evolutionary questions in a wide variety of organisms, including how fish stick to surfaces, how fishes move beneath the substrate, trade-offs in armor systems, and the development of free, open-source software for 3D visualization. He holds research associate positions at the Burke Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He is the last credit on Pixar's film Finding Nemo, where he worked as the fish guy. With more than 300 collaborators, he is an author on more than 200 papers spanning a wide range of biological and engineering projects.
How has your time in Rome shaped or shifted the direction of your project so far?
The time in Rome has made our project possible. Our investigation of fishes represented in antiquity was a speculative concept predicated on the possibility that some specific fish species could be recognized in material more than 2,000 years old. The fish plate in the Academy collection kickstarted our data collection and made it immediately clear that there are indeed fishes to be found in Rome. With the help of nearly every other Fellow at the Academy, we have scoured Rome and the surrounding cities and have turned up more than 1,300 images of aquatic organisms.
What part of your daily routine or environment at the Academy has most influenced you and your work?
Interactions with other Fellows, visitors, and staff have been the motivating force driving our data collection. Mornings at the bar and the wonderfully supportive people behind the Academy gates motivate me to broaden the investigation of fishes and take on new, unrelated creative projects.
Have any encounters—with people, places, or new information—opened up new paths in your research or practice in the past months?
In addition to the Fellows, I have had conversations with Valentina Follo that have sent me in exceptionally productive directions.
What are you hoping to explore or deepen in the remaining months of your residency?
At this point, we have over 1,000 fishes identified to the most specific possible taxon. I am working to add data from the literature on the artists and provenances of the works in which we have found them. Then we can move on to analyzing the data and making some headway in understanding what these fishes meant to the people who made them, and what the fishes can tell us about the marine environment in 280 BCE.
For example, some fishes that were commonly represented, and were presumably common, are now uncommon or rare. The Torpedo electric ray and the rainbow wrasse are examples. Fishes typically, 70% of the time, swim counterclockwise around a plate. Just 11% swim against this prevailing current. The orientation of the squid, octopus, and cuttlefish reveals that the artists had seen them in life or were imitating artists who had seen them. These cephalopods have large eyes, and had the painter only seen them dead, they would have drawn them swimming counterclockwise with their eyes leading the animal, as in fishes. But nearly all are correctly drawn swimming counterclockwise, with their eyes at the back.