2022-11-12: Darwin Day at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

This November, the Lutzoni Lab participated in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ annual “Darwin Day” event in Raleigh. The theme for this year was “Fungi” and the lab’s exhibit—”The Secret Life of Lichens”—featured lichen herbarium specimens, symbiont cultures, a dissecting microscope, lichen puzzles, and a really cool Scottish children’s video about lichens. A total of 3,579 people visited the museum Saturday—clearly, there is a desire from the public to learn more about science, and fungi in particular.

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2022-07: Peltigera fieldwork in Alberta

The Lutzoni Lab team of Carlos Pardo De la Hoz, Jola Miadlikowska, and François Lutzoni, along with Diane Haughland from the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), spent three weeks in Alberta, Canada, in the summer of 2022 to collect samples for our ongoing research on cyanolichen networks.

Find out more about this fieldwork and project here.

2021-8-15: Congratulations to Ian Medeiros!

Ian received the Margalith Galun Award for the best poster presented by a graduate student at the Ninth International Association for Lichenology (IAL9) conference. This meeting occurs only once every four years. The title of his poster was “Bolivian lecanoroid lichens exhibit photobiont interactions structured by elevation, mycobiont phylogeny, and substrate.”

2021-6-25: Congratulations to Carlos Pardo De la Hoz!

Carlos was one of the ten graduate students selected to compete for the Ernst Mayr Award at the Evolution 2021 meeting. As a third-year graduate student, he was the youngest competitor, some of whom had already defended their doctoral dissertation. The title of his talk in the Mayr Award symposium was “Ancient radiation explains most phylogenetic conflicts among core genes from nostocalean cyanobacteria”.