We are happy and excited to welcome Amanda Wilson to the Lutzoni lab as a first-year Ph.D. student in the Duke Biology department. Amanda is interested in studying the dispersal and population structure of fungal endophytes. Amanda graduated with a B.S. in Plant Sciences at Cornell University.
Category: News
2023-06-26: When Science and Art meet…
As a part of the BSURF program, Arielle went on an art crawl in downtown Durham for a weekend outing. She found a lichen glass art piece in one of the galleries by Teddy Devereux, a retired scientist who now focuses on artwork!
2023-03-26: Outreach lichen walk with Duke undergraduates
The Lutzoni Lab spent a rainy March afternoon talking about the biology of lichens with The Wild Ones, a Duke undergraduate student organization focused on increasing knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world.
François Lutzoni provides an introduction to the biology of the lichen symbiosis
2022-12-05: When Science and Art Meet at the End of the Road
Lutzoni Lab science-art outreach was featured on the Duke Biology website. See our past discussion of this outreach effort here.
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.
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.
2022-08: Welcome Diego Garfias Gallegos – New Ph.D. Student in the Lutzoni lab
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.
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”.
2021-5-14: Congratulations to Ian Medeiros!
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.