Dogs, horses, goats…oh my! Jade Collins, an ARCS Colorado Scholar, called those animals her pets while growing up. The list extends to spiders, snakes, lizards, and fish, thanks to her brothers’ choices in their animal companions. Collins has always wanted to work with animals, and as an intern, she’s doing just that, but it’s not the animal you’d think.

Collins is a double undergraduate major in Biology and Computer Science, and she’s diving into the deep end this summer to research shark skin hydrodynamics. This is a new study to Collins at the Lauder Lab at Harvard University,

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” she confirms, “Most biology labs I’ve worked on focus on basics like chemistry and bacteria studies.”

Not only will this internship help gain an understanding of shark skin, but it will also undo their negative image as an animal to fear. “It’s important to study shark skin hydrodynamics because we can understand sharks more because they get a really bad rap and people are afraid of them,” Collins explains, “We don’t know a lot about them and their skin. It’s never been studied.”

Existing research on shark skins helped create competitive swimsuits, such as Speedo full body suits, and riblet materials used on sailboats, and wind turbine blades. The Lauder Lab proved in 2012 that the shark skin’s surface can reduce drag while increasing thrust during swimming to improve swimming speed.

While that research is important, it’s more about evolution for Collins. Sharks can be traced back through evolution to before dinosaurs(200 million years before dinosaurs!), yet researchers still don’t know much about them. “The goal of our lab is to understand sharks more,” she shares. “Why do they have denticles? Why did these evolve? How does this help them?” are all questions she’s hoping to answer in the lab.

Her lab has live sharks they study but don’t experiment on. The shark experiments are conducted on beached shark samples collected from organizations such as NOAA. “We don’t know why shark skins are so complex,” she says. “Different sharks have different types of skins, and how they regenerate is still a mystery. We’re still trying to figure it out.”

Shark skin is as mysterious to researchers as Collins’ post-college future is to her. As a biologist, she’s interested in genetic research, specifically animal genetics and behavioral and wildlife conservation and rehabilitation. As a computer scientist, she’s interested in human-centered computing, such as user experiential design.

She hopes to delve further into bioinformatics, which is a cross between the two subjects. “It’s writing code to help process a large amount of data,” she explains. “It’s used in a lot of genetics and genomics research.”

Collins is grateful to be an undergraduate receiving the Scholar Award, which boosted her confidence. “The Scholar Award helped my confidence as I always feel kind of like an imposter,” she confesses. “Getting the recognition by ARCS made me realize undergrads are also important, even if we’re doing the grunt work with helping graduate students with their projects.”