The Shark Research and Conservation Program provides a platform for students to conduct research while enrolled in graduate school at the University of Miami. Many students come to us through the Master of Professional Science program, applying to join the lab during their second semester. Most often, SRC Master of Science students join the lab by transferring from the MPS program. PhD student assistantships are dependent on available space and funding within the lab; Dr. Macdonald is not recruiting new PhD students for Fall 2026. PhD positions available at the Rosenstiel School can be found here. Graduate students with existing fellowship support interested in joining SRC should contact our Director. This resource may also be helpful for those applying to graduate school.

Thank you so much for your interest in supporting our mission! You can make a secure online contribution by visiting the donation page of our website and following the on-screen instructions. We also have an online store where proceeds from purchasing cool shark apparel goes to supporting our program. Please check it out at: ShopForSharks.com, or check out our field shirts. Contact us with any questions about donations at UMSharkResearch@miami.edu.

Thank you for your interest in participating in SRC’s educational field research opportunities. We are always happy to connect with possible education partner organizations! Please email our logistics coordinator at UMSharkResearch@miami.edu to discuss further. We schedule trips by semester, so there is normally at least a several month lead time for trips with us.

While we would love to bring you out with us, we are not able to coordinate directly to schedule trips with with individual high school students or accept interns under 18 years of age. Instead, we work to organize trips with high school groups, classes, and clubs by coordinating with supervising teachers. Feel free to talk to your teachers about organizing a group, and then ask them to contact us at UMSharkResearch@miami.edu.

We offer a wide array of educational resources. For our comprehensive directory of virtual learning resources, please explore the links. Our graduate students are also occasionally available to join interested classrooms virtually to answer questions about sharks and shark science.

1. Use our free High school curriculum
2. Track our sharks online
3. Use SRC scientific data in class research projects

Yes! We would love to have your company aboard for a custom-tailored Citizen Science experience. For more information on corporate expeditions, please contact UMSharkResearch@miami.edu.

We offer many avenues for staying in touch, and would love to connect with you on social media. We are most active on Instagram and hope to see you there!

Ancestors of our modern sharks appeared on earth around 450 million years ago, which means shark ancestors had already been swimming around for more than 200 million years before the first dinosaur walked the earth. They have survived at least five major extinction events that many or most other vertebrate species did not. Fossil sharks are fascinating but hard to study, because many fossil shark species are identified based on as little as one tooth. Cartilage does not fossilize as easily as bone and so the fossil record for sharks is often incomplete.

Hominids, in contrast, date back no further than 4.5 million years – which means that even counting pre-human hominids, we have been on the plant for only one percent of the time in which sharks have swum in the sea.

There are more than 540 species of sharks (and more are discovered all the time). Most shark species bear little resemblance to the large predatory sharks people think of when they hear the word “shark”–the average shark is just a few feet long. Sharks are incredibly diverse in appearance, ecological function, and behavior. They are found in oceans all over the world—there are sharks that live in fresh water, sharks that are pink, sharks that can glow, even sharks that live under arctic ice!

According to the most recent data from the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), which creates and maintains the IUCN “Red List” of threatened species, 37% of shark and ray species are evaluated as Threatened, Endangered, or Critically Endangered. Based on this estimate, sharks and rays are the second-most threatened group of vertebrates on the planet after amphibians.

Sharks are caught by humans for harvest, or sometimes by accident when people are trying to catch other things (which is called “bycatch”). Targeted shark fisheries may seek out and capture sharks for their meat, fins, or sometimes jaws, skin, or liver oil. Some recreational fishers catch and kill sharks as trophies (in contrast to catch-and-release fishing, which tries to release sharks in healthy condition). Sharks may also be affected by humans indirectly through threats like habitat loss, pollution, climate change, and fishing-driven declines in the species sharks rely on for food.

Data does not exist to exactly quantify the number of sharks humans catch each year. One study, however, estimated the global catch of sharks at around 100 million sharks per year.

The risk is already extremely small. The average American has a 1 in 5 chance of dying from heart disease, a 1 in 7 chance of dying from cancer, and a 1 in 3.8 million chance of being killed by a shark. However, there are a few basic common-sense strategies that swimmers and surfers use to reduce their chances of encountering a shark. Try to remain relatively close to shore and to other people, and swim during the day and not around dawn or dusk when sharks tend to be most actively hunting. Try to avoid areas near river mouths, as water there tends to be murky and some sharks like to hang out there, hoping a free meal will wash out to sea. You may not want to swim or dive in areas of unusually high fish density where sharks are likely to be present feeding. The reality is that sharks generally try to avoid people when they encounter them.

Sharks have significantly fewer nerve endings than humans do. Humans have developed tremendously complex nervous systems with many millions of nerves as part of the process of evolution, nerves that “teach” us—through pain—what we should and shouldn’t do (don’t touch a hot stove). However, this level of sensitivity to temperature, pressure or pain has not been necessary for sharks. While we can’t say exactly what a shark feels, we do know that they do not react to potentially painful stimuli the way mammals like humans do.

Tags allow scientists to study shark movement, especially migratory and residency patterns. This data can be used to identify areas that are critical for shark mating, pupping, and feeding, as well as to better understand locations where sharks are vulnerable to fishing. Data from shark tags can help policy makers implement effective management strategies that will improve conservation outcomes for threatened shark species.