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.

2021-6-25: 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”.

2020-10: Nicolas Magain, Assistant Professor at the University of Liège

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 PeltigeraNostoc 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.