Category: News

Lutzoni Lab science-art outreach was featured on the Duke Biology website. See our past discussion of this outreach effort here.

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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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.

We are excited to welcome Diego Garfias Gallegos to the Lutzoni lab as a first-year Ph.D. student in the Duke Biology department. Previously, he studied the cycad microbiome as a master’s student at Langebio, Cinvestav, Mexico.

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.”

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”.

Ian was one of the recipients of the Graduate Student Research Awards given each year by The Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) to assist graduate students conducting research in systematics. This award will fund Ian’s research on endophytic and endolichenic Eurotiomycetes.

Congratulations to Ryoko Oono for obtaining tenure at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Ryoko conducted postdoctoral research in the Lutzoni lab on fungal endophytes before obtaining a tenure-track position at UCSB.

Congratulations to Dr. Nicolas Magain for obtaining an Assistant Professor position in the Evolution and Conservation Biology unit of the University of Liège in Belgium. Nicolas spent most of his Ph.D. in the Lutzoni lab and continued his phylogenetic revision of the genus Peltigera and to address macroevolutionary questions using Peltigera–Nostoc as a model system during his postdoctoral research in the Lutzoni Lab at Duke University. You can find more information about his current research in his newly established lab at this website.

Congratulations to Dr. Ko-Hsuan Chen for obtaining an Assistant Research Fellow position at the Biodiversity Research Center of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Ko-Hsuan completed her Ph.D. in the Lutzoni lab in 2017 focussing on fungal endophytes in the Class Eurotiomycetes and her pioneering metatranscriptomic study of fungal endophytes in the model moss system Dicranum scoparium. You can find more information about her current research in her newly established lab at this website.