MSA Student and Postdoc Section

A native of Montreal, Emile Gluck-Thaler is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University in Dr. Jason C. Slot’s lab. Emile is interested in the genetics of fungal ecology. Fungal lifestyles are notoriously difficult to pin down, and often, a single species will be associated with multiple ecological roles. For example, some fungi can shift between decomposer, pathogen and mutualist within a single round of their lifecycle. This high degree of phenotypic plasticity is a really important part of how fungi evolve and interact with other organisms, and Emile wants to learn more about how they do it. Right now, he is researching the phenomenon of gene clustering, where genes involved in the same metabolic pathway are positioned next to one another on fungal chromosomes, in order to better understand how fungal ecology and metabolism are reflected in the organization of genes in genomes. Emile writes computer programs and builds phylogenetic trees to identify new types of gene clusters and to study the evolutionary processes leading to their assembly, distribution and degradation. His ultimate objective is to link gene clusters with metabolic pathways that help fungi adapt to particular niches. After completing his PhD, Emile plans to post-doc before finding a research position at a university. He plans to ultimately find or make a job where he can continue learning, thinking, and writing about fungi.

What is your favorite fungus and why?

Difficult question, but it has to Septbasidium apiculatum. This species, along with many others in its genus, weaves dense mycelial mats that shelter sap-sucking insects on the surfaces of some plants. These fungi then parasitize some of the insects, holding them in place and using them as a living straw to suck nutrients out of the plant! This is just a wonderful example of how fungi co-opt other organisms while adapting to their environment.

What is your favorite fact/thing about fungi?

Fungi are about as close as you can get to studying alien life without having to leave Earth. Because their body plan is essentially a modular network, they challenge our preconceptions of individuality that are based on traditional animal and plant paradigms. This never ceases to blow my mind.

What do you like to do in your free time? What are your hobbies?

Foodwise, I’m really into making kimchi, and have lately been trying to go beyond cabbage and ferment all kinds of different veggies. I love to hike, but tend to slow everyone else down, as I can get a little obsessive about finding the right angle to photograph the fungi I come across. I also am an avid boardgamer.

Anything else you’d like to talk about?

One of my goals over the next few years is to make a board game about fungi. Board games are a great way to get people engaged with subjects that they wouldn’t otherwise care about, and I think that even a very basic game based on the fundamentals of fungal biology and ecology would go a long way to help familiarize people with fungi.

Lindsey Becker grew up in North Carolina, where she continues to reside. Lindsey is a Master’s student in Dr. Marc Cubeta’s lab at North Carolina State University where she works on a plant growth promoting fungus in a floriculture system. Lindsey is analyzing foliage area, plant tissue nutrient composition, biomass, and flower counts of Calibrachoa (mini-petunias) in relation to the plant growth promoting fungus Mortierella elongaga, for the link between soil/plant microbiomes and the timing/abundance of flowers. She is finishing up her MS thesis with the pleasant task of counting flowers, and preparing for her PhD.

What are your career goals/plans after you’re done your current position?

I would like to work for the USDA ARS as a research scientist specializing in understanding the benefits of plant microbiomes. I’m also very interested in working for biotech companies seeking to exploit fungal endophytes to prevent disease development.

What is your favorite fungus and why?

I love Microstoma floccossum (shaggy scarlet cup). It’s hard to spot during a casual walk in the woods and it is very Dr. Seuss-like with its pink cup and white hairs.

What is your favorite fact about fungi?

That the hyphal tip is capable of puncturing gold foil. That is just nuts.

Any great stories from field work?

I used to core dead ash trees in Michigan, and the sound of the tree being cored would start a call-and-response with any sandhill cranes that were nearby. One time in the NC mountains a couple of adorable baby black bear cubs wandered into our research plot about 30 feet away from us. Fortunately, we never encountered mama bear and we were able to shoo away the cubs.

What do you like to do in your free time? What are your hobbies?

I love to bike, both to commute and for fun. I am never a serious biker because all of my routes are centered around breweries, coffee shops, and bakeries.

Anything else you’d like to talk about?

Outreach is always a blast- you never know what kind of questions people might have for you about fungi. The last time I volunteered I looked at pictures of someone’s diseased cherry tree and received advice on where to start my own commercial mushroom farm. Kids generally ask the best questions about fungi because they make very few assumptions.

Abigail Courtney grew up just outside of Manhattan in New York. She moved to New Jersey for her undergraduate education, where she got her B.S. in bioinformatics from Ramapo College of New Jersey. While there, she worked on an undergraduate research project titled Responses of growth, antioxidants and gene expression in smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) to various levels of salinity. While in New Jersey, Abbie completed a summer program through Rutgers University studying the molecular evolution of RNA-dependent RNA Polymerase in ticks.

From there, Abbie moved to the University of Georgia where she is currently a graduate student in Zachary Lewis’ lab. Her thesis is titled H2A.Z and Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 in Neurospora crassa: An unlikely partnership, where she examines how the three-dimensional structure of DNA affects gene expression. The Lewis lab is interested in identifying the mechanisms that govern the establishment and maintenance of silent chromatin in the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa. The Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 catalyzes the methylation of Lysine 27 on Histone 3 (H3K27me2/3). Polycomb group proteins assemble specialized repressive chromatin domains that are critical for proper gene regulation in plants, animals, and some fungi. The specific mechanisms of how Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 target domains are established and maintained are poorly understood. Abbie recently discovered that the histone variant H2A.Z is required for normal patterns of H3K27me2/3 in N. crassa. H2A.Z has been implicated in DNA repair, gene repression, and transcriptional activation. The focus of her thesis project is to define the mechanisms of these context-specific H2A.Z functions, including establishment or maintenance of H3K27me2/3. Abbie is a 2017 recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, MSA best graduate poster, and a GSA Career Development Symposia Grant to work with six other students from the University of Georgia to develop the Southeast Mycology Symposium (SEMS).

What are your career goals? What are your plans for after your PhD?

That’s what I am working on figuring out this year! After my PhD, I plan to continue my adventure in fungal biology working as a postdoc.

What is your favorite mushroom/fungus?

I think I am a little biased here, but I’m going to have to go with Neurospora crassa.

What do you like to do in your free time? What are your hobbies?

I read, crochet, and volunteer at the local animal shelter. I love to cook and prepare my meals for the entire week every Sunday.

Anything else you’d like to talk about (Career goals, outreach, science communication, photography)?

I am the VP of Digital Media for S.P.E.A.R. – Science Policy Education, Advocacy, and Research. SPEAR is a student organization that aims to provide a resource for discussion of science policy issues as well as a platform for initiating advocacy and promoting research within and beyond the University of Georgia.

I am the social media coordinator and webmaster for the UGA Fungal Group.

Every year I judge the junior division (grades 6-8) at the Georgia Science and Engineering Science Fair.

I am a volunteer expert for the “Ask an Expert” section of the website Sciencebuddies.com. I help guide students who have questions related to their science fair projects.

Laura Tipton is at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in Nicole Hynson’s lab where she is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Microbiome of the Built Environment Postdoctoral Fellow. She works on the longest aerobiota study and one of the longest microbial time-course studies known, looking at fungi captured in air filters over a 13-year period at the Mauna Loa Observatory. Because of the island’s remote location and the observatory’s high elevation, almost all of the fungi arrived via long distance dispersal so they have a lot of questions to ask about the community, starting with diversity and hopefully expanding to include the bacteria.

Before the move to Hawai’i, Laura grew up in Virginia and attended the University of Virginia for her undergraduate degree in biostatistics with a minor in dance. From there, she completed her Master’s degree in statistics from George Washington University and her PhD in computational biology from Carnegie Mellon-University of Pittsburgh. Laura’s dissertation was titled Quantitative Inferences from the Lung Microbiome, which used next-generation sequencing on samples from human lungs. This study looked for associations with inflammation markers in the human, predicted interactions between bacteria and fungi and how those interactions impact the microbial community network, and integrated multiple -omics technologies to get a better picture of the community metabolism.

What are your career goals? What are your plans for after your post-doc?

I’d love to be a professor. Since before starting my PhD, I wanted to be a research professor, in part because I have never taught a whole semester, college level course. Recently I’ve had two realizations that make me think I may like to be a “regular” professor just as much: 1) the scarcity of research-only positions, and 2) that teaching is teaching, no matter the subject, and I’ve always enjoyed teaching dance classes.

What is your favorite mushroom/fungus, and what do you like about it?

I’m partial to Emericella nidulans (aka Aspergillus nidulans) because it is the first (and so far, only) fungus I’ve grown in culture, but I’m open to new favorites as I learn more about different species.

What is your favorite thing/fact about mushrooms/fungi?

I don’t know if I’ve been in mycology long enough to have a favorite thing (I started my postdoc in January 2017) but I’m still in awe of the variety and ubiquity of fungi.

Do you have any funny or interesting stories about field or lab work?

Coming from a background in statistics, I didn’t do any lab work until my PhD. My first unsupervised lab task was to extract DNA from induced sputum (coughed up slime) samples, some of which originated from patients with HIV. My advisor was so surprised and proud to see me in the “wet” lab that she ran to get her phone and take a picture of me before she reminded me that I needed to be wearing a respirator and goggles due to the potential of HIV in the samples (I was following the rest of the safety protocols, I swear). It then became a tradition for her or someone else in the lab to take pictures of me every time I did anything in the wet lab.

What do you like to do in your free time? What are your hobbies?

I bake, play board games, and stand-up paddleboard, but mostly I dance. Specifically, I study a form of classical modern dance in the style of Isadora Duncan. Sometimes my work bleeds over into my hobbies; I recently presented work at the Isadora Duncan International Symposium analyzing the group of “Duncan dance” practitioners as a network.

J. Alejandro Rojas is currently a post-doctoral research scientist working with Rytas Vilaglays at Duke University. His postdoctoral research is focused on plant-fungal interactions, with a specific focus on symbiotic fungi associated with the Populus rhizosphere. The aim is to understand the functional role, diversity, and population structure of dominant fungal species in this system

He is originally from Colombia, and I grew up in small town outside of Bogotá. Alejandro received his B.Sc. Microbiology (Minor in Chemistry) from Los Andes University, in Bogotá, Colombia in 2005. He also earned a M.Sc from Los Andes University, his thesis title was Isoenzymatic characterization of proteases, amylases and partial purification of proteases from filamentous fungi causing biodeterioration of industrial paper. The aim of that research was to characterize the diversity of fungi growing on early 1900’s documents and characterize the enzymatic activities of these fungi, and to establish isolates with a bioprospective potential to be use for the production of enzymes. Alejandro than traveled to Michigan State Univeristy, where he received a second M.Sc. working on Phenotypic and genotypic characterization of Phytophthora infestans isolates from Michigan and tuber late blight development. He used different plant and in vitro assays to characterize phenotype of P. infestans in conjunction with SSRs. Aljeandro earned his Ph.D in Plant Pathology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior from MSU in 2016, working with Dr. Martin Chilvers. His dissertation was titled, Diversity of oomycetes associated with soybean seedling diseases. The aim of that research was to characterize oomycete communities associated with soybean seedlings using culture and amplicon sequencing, as well as developing detection methods for major oomycete species affecting soybean.

What are your career goals? What are your plans for after your post-doc?

My current career goals are centered around the ecology of soilborne fungi, either beneficial or pathogenic fungi. There is a vast field of research being developed using the novel microbiome approaches, but there is room for merging traditional concepts and methods with novel approaches to understand the complex interactions happening at the soil and root level.  In terms of mentoring, I also look forward to teaching and mentoring students taking advantage of the research to provide them with the tools and the experience to thrive on science.  Nowadays, it is important to support students and help them to communicate their science to different audiences, which is something that all of science is currently struggling to do.  To accomplish these goals, I hope to become a professor to mentor and guide students providing opportunities like the ones that I have received.  Mentoring is a great responsibility, but it can be very rewarding as you mentor people not only in science, but also on their professional values and the lab life promoting their wellness and success.

What is your favorite fungus, and what do you like about it?

One of the fist fungi that I was able to observe under the microscope was Cladosporium, the “shield” shaped conidia, it is one of the things that I will always remember and enjoy.  It is a pretty simple fungus and it is present everywhere, but I crossed paths with this fungus a couple times.  One of the first encounters was in plant pathology, since it was one of the main diseases on tomato and it was also used as model to develop early effector studies in fungi.  Nowadays, some collaborators are trying to use it to control diseases on poplar.  I am sure that there will be more interesting things that will come with the time about this fungus.  Nonetheless, I must say that now that I got to work with ectomycorrhizal fungi, the boletes are nice and charismatic, there are few species in Populus that are very nice and they are making it to my favorite mushroom list, such as a Boletus coccyginus.

What is your favorite thing/fact about mushrooms/fungi?

Coming from a plant pathology background, it is really amazing the plasticity and subtle elegance that some of these organisms have to “infect” plants, the elaborate mechanisms that have evolved to do so, and it is really exciting to see this also present in the fungal symbiosis with plants, like the mycorrhizas.  There is so much to discover and understand regarding the interactions between fungi and plants. This is one of my favorite topics and one of focuses of my career.  It is also intriguing the various interactions that fungi can have with different organisms across different groups or kingdoms, such as viruses, bacteria and insects.

Do you have any funny or interesting stories about field or lab work?

It was pretty cool to visit Washington and Oregon last year to sample mushrooms growing under poplar, you get to see really amazing forests and landscapes, and how the landscapes change quickly going from west to east, driving along the Columbia river and then across Mt. Hood.  I have to say that it was an interesting and amazing field trip and great way to start working with mushrooms and fungi associated with Poplar.

What do you like to do in your free time? What are your hobbies?

Work-life balance is really important for me, and my free time is dedicated to my family.  My two little children are my main focus nowadays.  In other times the geek inside me loved to read and watch movies like Lord of the Rings and all the related novels. When I go back home I enjoy fishing with my dad.

Samuel T. David grew up in Stoughton Wisconsin, a small town just south of Madison. Sam received his BS in Biology from University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He then worked for three years doing habitat restoration and wildlife management on Fort McCoy military base before returning to UW-La Crosse. While in grad school he continues to work summers on Fort McCoy doing vegetation monitoring. He received his Master of Science in Biology in May 2017. With a thesis titled, Species composition and abundance of endorrhizal fungi in Carex pensylvanica from sand prairies. At UW-La Crosse, Sam worked with Tom Volk and Todd Osmundson. Sam’s research identified and measured colonization of the fungi found on the roots of Carex pensylvanica and looked at different environmental factors that may influence the plant-fungal interaction. Although C. pensylvanica grows from Iowa to Nova Scotia in a variety of habitats, Sam specifically investigated sand prairies because these are endangered habitats native to Wisconsin and the fungi in these habitats are not well understood.

From UWL, Sam received an RSEL grant to complete his research and a Travel Award to give an invited talk at the 2016 Radical Mycology Convergence about endophytes as an emerging area for fungal research and applications. He also volunteers time to survey and generate fungal species lists for local natural areas managed by a non-for-profit organization. In the future Sam hopes to find an interesting career, that is a mix of natural resource management, education and art.

How did you become a mycologist?

Like a hyphal tip, I grew into it…my high school science teacher, Jack Palmer, first taught me about mycorrhizae and sparked an interest. Going through a skater-punk adolescence, I was interested in things that are all around us and important, but most people don’t know about or understand, like fungi. With some fungal guidance, I decided I wanted to go to school for biology. While in biology at UW-La Crosse, I took Mycology with Tom Volk and became hooked. That’s when I heard the John Rippon quote, “Mycology is an exercise in contemplative observation,” and knew it was for me. I continued to identify, pick and eat mushrooms while working in natural resources and became known as “the mushroom guy” to my co-workers. After a few years, I happened to go on a foray with the newly formed UWL Mycology club and ran into Tom again. He encouraged me to go to grad school, so I applied, got in and ran with it.

Who is your mycology role model?

Radagast the Brown

What is your favorite mushroom/fungus, and what do you like about it?

Amanita virosa for the taste.

What is your favorite thing about mushrooms?

The thrill of finding choice edibles in the woods and sharing that feeling with friends.

Do you have any funny or interesting stories about field work?

Working on a military base is always interesting because you don’t know what you will see or find. You can be looking at rare wildflowers with helicopters carrying Humvees flying over and assault rifles going off in the distance. I have also found several unexploded ordinances including various bombs and a tank round from WWII training. We did prescribed burns in places where there were left over ammunition that started to go off. It is scary at first, but the majority are blanks and even real bullets don’t shoot out much unless out of a barrel.

One time I was walking through 8ft tall hazel brush and almost walked into a black bear. Luckily I sounded big so it ran off just before I got to it.

What do you like to do in your free time? What are your hobbies?

I like to play music with friends. I play guitar mostly, but also know bass and ukulele. Other than music, I hike, camp, rock climb, canoe, snowboard, long board, rollerblade, disc golf, hunt, fish, forage, and drink beer. I was a ceramics minor and owned and operated a little pottery business until I was too busy in grad school, but want to get back into it.

Eric Morrison grew up in Claremont, New Hampshire, which has the peculiar distinction of being NH’s smallest city. Eric earned a B.S. Environmental Conservation with a focus in Conservation Biology from the University of New Hampshire, May 2009. He also holds a M.S. Microbiologyfrom University of New Hampshire. His thesis research was published in Morrison EW, Frey SD, Sadowsky JJ, van Diepen LTA, Thomas WK, Pringle A. 2016. Chronic nitrogen additions fundamentally restructure the soil fungal community in a temperate forest. Fungal Ecology, 23: 48-57. Eric is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Earth and Environmental Science at the University of New Hampshire, working with Serita Frey.

Eric’s research site is at the Harvard Forest LTER in central Massachusetts, there are two long-term experiments where forest soil was heated 5°C or fertilized with N over the course of ten to twenty years. He used these manipulations to predict how leaf litter decomposition and fungal communities of litter might change in the future. He is also measuring growth and respiration rates and performing whole-genome sequencing of various species of fungi isolated from Harvard Forest to understand how temperature affects the efficiency of fungal growth (i.e. the balance between biomass and CO₂ production) and whether there are predictable genomic controls on fungal growth efficiency.

How did you become a mycologist?

It kind of happened by accident. In undergrad my first love was evolutionary biology. I became really interested in microbiology after taking a class in microbial ecology and evolution with Vaughn Cooper (now at the University of Pittsburgh) who, as an alum of Richard Lenski’s lab, is an expert in experimental evolution. At the same time, I knew I wanted to work in a field that could impact the environment in positive ways, and was inspired by some of the PhD students in Serita Frey’s lab at UNH studying how soils and soil microbes regulate and interact with climate. It turns out that fungi are the natural intersection of all these interests – they have amazing biology in their own right, but are also hugely important for regulating ecosystem dynamics, especially in forests.

Who is your mycology role model?

I have to say Anne Pringle. I’ve worked with her throughout my MS and PhD career, and I’m always inspired by her passion for clear, charismatic communication about fungi.

What is your favorite mushroom/fungus, and what do you like about it?

Russula vinacea was something of an obsession for me while I was working on my MS degree. It turns out to have an interesting response to N fertilization, has a visually pleasing dusty wine-purple color, and was a bit tricky to identify because of misidentification/conflation with R. atropurpurea in species descriptions and GenBank.

What is your favorite fact about fungi?

I think my favorite thing about fungi is that there are so many that haven’t been described. It’s daunting to think about the challenges this poses for understanding the ecology and the functioning of communities, but at the same time there is this mysterious world of potential just waiting to be explored.

Do you have any funny or interesting stories about field work?

Rural Massachusetts is a pretty tame place to work so I haven’t experienced any dramatic animal encounters, but I have had some funny human-related interactions during fieldwork. We measure soil C stocks in our lab by coring soil with a gas-powered posthole digger fitted with an auger corer. It’s pretty unwieldy and requires two people to run, but we can often drill through pieces of granite and other obstacles that would otherwise make getting accurate measurements difficult. Several years ago I was working with a research scientist in our lab to sample for a group of visiting scientists. While we ran the auger, three professors laid directly next to the plots we were working in chatting and periodically putting small bits of soil in their mouths to get “soil texture by mouth-feel” measurements! No hard feelings obviously, but it was pretty funny and kind of felt like a soil science-Monty Python skit.

What do you like to do in your free time? What are your hobbies?

In my free time I try to keep up my musical skills by practicing (drums primarily) and listening to music. I also love cooking while listening to political podcasts – to the point where my partner tells me I might have a podcast problem.

Edward Barge is from Bozeman, Montana. Ed received a BS in biology, and MS in plant science under Dr. Cathy Cripps at Montana State University, in Bozeman. His Master’s thesis focused on systematics and biogeography of Lactarius in the Rocky Mountain alpine zone (above treeline). This project allowed Ed to do field work in some beautiful high alpine habitats and learn molecular techniques. He recognized 7 species, one of them new, variously associated with dwarf and shrubby willows and birch, and he showed that most of the species are in fact broadly, intercontinentally distributed in arctic-alpine and in some cases also subalpine areas in the northern hemisphere – a pattern we are seeing with many boreal/arctic-alpine fungi. As a Master’s student Ed received two Montana Institute on Ecosystems awards that helped fund his research and trip to the 2014 MSA meeting in Lansing, MI.

Ed is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Oregon State University working under Dr. Posy Busby, where his mycology has gone from the macro to the micro. He is studying foliar fungal endophyte community structure, population genetics and function in relation to geography, environment and disease within the black cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa) system.

What are your career goals? What are your plans for after your PhD?

Becoming a professor with a lab would be great, but who knows, maybe I’ll end up living in the woods. Whatever the case may be, I plan to keep doing research and fighting for science and mycology!

What is your favorite mushroom/fungus, and what do you like about it?

That is a tough question. Although I get sick of seeing it during the right time of year, I think a beautiful mushroom is Gomphidius subroseus with its nice rosy cap, decurrent gills, and slime veil. Also interesting that it parasitizes Suillus lakei mycelium.

What is your favorite fact about fungi?

In general, I am just inspired by the sheer diversity of fungi, the many environments they inhabit and the things (unknown and known) they do for us and the world. Recently I have been especially intrigued by horizontal gene transfer and the consequences this might have on host specificity, mutualism, pathogenicity, and fungal evolution and ecology in general.

Do you have any funny or interesting stories about field or lab work?

Doing field work in the Rocky Mountains has led to many interesting experiences. I had a run in with a bear while collecting Lactarius and all I could think to do was pull out my pocket knife and just stand there frozen – luckily the bear wasn’t too interested in me. Once I forgot hiking boots on a fairly lengthy field excursion and had to duct tape flip flops to my feet, which actually worked surprisingly well. Possibly the scariest field experience I’ve had was driving down a very remote jeep road in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado in a soccer mom car. It turned out to be A LOT worse and longer than we were expecting. On the map it looked like it would take about an hour, but it ended taking five. At times I thought we were going to have to abandon the car and hike out. But alas, at the bottom we ran into the largest fruiting of porcini I have ever seen.

What do you like to do in your free time? What are your hobbies?

Mushroom hunting, drawing, listening to music, fly fishing, running, backpacking, camping, cooking.

Andi Bruce is from Santa Ana, California. She received her BA in Environmental Studies (Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice concentration) at San Francisco State University. Currently she is working toward a Master’s in Biology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in the labs of Todd Osmundson and Tom Volk. Andi is researching the synergistic effects between fungi with different decay strategies to increase the effectiveness of mycoremediation of diesel-contaminated soil. Her experiments involve the co-inoculation of the brown rot Fibroporia vaillantii and the white rot Stropharia rugosoannulata in non-sterile, diesel-spiked soil.

How did you become a mycologist?

While traveling in Australia in 2012, I wound up couch-surfing with an amateur mycologist, who introduced me to the weird and wonderful world of fungi. When I returned stateside, I stumbled upon a copy of Mycelium Running, which brought everything full circle for me! My undergraduate work revolved around environmental sustainability and social justice, and I found the low-cost, low-tech potential for fungi in environmental remediation very exciting! I started volunteering in a mycology lab (thank you Mia Maltz and Kathleen Treseder!), where I got involved in a few different mycology projects, and even took the lead on a small project of my own. The lab skills and techniques I learned there were instrumental in my acceptance into grad school about a year later.

Who is your mycology role model?

I have a few! I am inspired by Lynne Boddy as a pioneer in the areas of fungal interactions and community structure, and as a charismatic champion of mycological education and outreach. I also look up to my primary advisor, Todd Osmundson, an endlessly patient educator with incredible fungal genetics savvy. Tom Volk is another; he pushes students to be themselves and trust themselves in ways that lead them to accomplish greatness both in and outside academia.  Lastly, Mia Maltz inspires me as a natural born leader and community organizer, dedicated to bringing mycology education and applications to people and places that need it.

What is your favorite fungus, and what do you like about it?

Chlorociboria aeruginascens is one of my favorites. The blue-green stain it leaves on wood is so beautiful! It doesn’t fruit very frequently, so it’s exciting to find its fruiting bodies in nature.

What is your favorite fact about fungi?

I like pointing out to people that fungi are our biggest competitors for food. Most people think of mold as something that just happens to your food if you wait too long; few consider that it’s a living organism that we go to great lengths to compete against (and often fail). Ultimately, I think my favorite thing about fungi is that they are such unsung heroes. They are critically important to the ongoing transformation of this earth into an inhabitable environment in about a million different ways, and most people have no idea.

Do you have any funny or interesting stories about field work?

I collected soil to culture fungi from an experimental revegetation site in southern California, which ran along a 1300-ft ridge. There was always an upward air current along the ridge that caused crows gather en masse for coasting. It was amazing and bizarre to walk along the ridge with a murder of crows suspended in the air at eye level. The way the crows appeared so stationary in the air reminded me of those movie scenes where a character pauses reality and walks through a scene that is suspended in time.

What do you like to do in your free time? What are your hobbies?

I love to travel; after I finished my undergrad, I spent almost 2 years traveling the world by myself. I spend a lot of time outdoors hiking, camping, cycling, canoeing, snowshoeing, or rock climbing. I also recently started doing stand-up comedy as a hobby.