Category: News

This collaborative work was done as part of the NSF GoLife project on endophytic and endolichenic fungi (mycophygolife.org).

The Lutzoni Lab hosted a lichen field trip for the “Wild Ones,” an undergraduate natural history club at Duke. Selected photos from the trip can be viewed here. We all had a great time sharing our enthusiasm for lichens with the group!

We’re excited to welcome Scott LaGreca to the lichenology team at Duke. Scott is coming to us from Cornell University, where he was curator of the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium (CUP).

This is actually a homecoming for Scott, since he did his Ph.D. at Duke with lichenologist William Culberson.

Well done Ian!!!

Ian graduated from the College of the Atlantic (Maine) with a broad interest in natural sciences. Ian is already an accomplished lichenologist with extensive research experience. We are delighted to have him join the Lutzoni lab.

Congratulations to Dr. Ko-Hsuan Chen for successfully defending her doctoral dissertation at Duke University, Lutzoni Lab.  Her dissertation is entitled “Evolution of fungal endophytes and their functional transitions between endophytism and saprotrophism.”

Jade was awarded The Excellence in Plant Science Prize, which is given each year by the Plant Science faculty at the graduation ceremony in recognition of excellence in botanical research. Jade’s honor thesis was entitled “Patterns of symbiotic associations between Peltigera and Nostoc along a latitudinal transect crossing the circumboreal belt.”

Ko-Hsuan Chen was award a NSF DDIG for her proposal entitled “Assessing the Importance of Trophic Lability for Fungal Endophytism Using the Moss Dicranum scoparium and its Associated Fungi.” Well done Ko-Hsuan!!!

Nicolas Magain and collaborators published in Systematic Biology one of the core studies of Nicolas’ doctoral research in the Sérusiaux and Lutzoni labs.

Magain, N., Miadlikowska, J., Goffinet, B., Sérusiaux, E., and Lutzoni. F. 2017. Macroevolution of specificity in cyanolichens of the genus Peltigera section Polydactylon (Lecanoromycetes, Ascomycota). Systematic Biology 66:74-99.

Ester Gaya and collaborators published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences one of the core studies she conducted as a postdoctoral researcher in the Lutzoni lab, which was funded by a Fulbright fellowship and NSF.

Gaya, E., Fernández-Brime, S., Vargas, R., Lachlan, R. F., Gueidan, C., Ramírez-Mejía, M., Lutzoni, F. 2015. The adaptive radiation of lichen-forming Teloschistaceae is associated with sunscreening pigments and a bark-to-rock substrate shift. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112: 11600-11605.