2023 Program Details

February 16

7 PM

This is an online MycoConsortium presentation. Details will be emailed to members a few days before the presentation.

Rosanne Healy 
Topic: Dishing On The Cup Fungi:  The Pezizales and Their Varied Lifestyles

Rosanne will talk about her travels and work to better understand the relationships, ecology and life history of the group of fungi that we know as the Cup Fungi. These are the fungi that include the famous black Perigord truffle, delectable morels and iconic scarlet cups. They also include many lesser known, but fascinating truffles and cup-shaped, columni-form, and saddle-shaped fungi. Rosanne has traveled and worked with Don Pfister and a team of truffle mycologists for twenty five years, tracking down data to help fill in the natural history of truffles and cup fungi, to better understand how they are related, what their ecologies are and how their ancestors moved around to where they are now.

Bio: Dr. Rosanne Healy received her advanced degrees from Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota. She did post doctoral work with Dr. Don Pfister at Harvard. Her research centers on Pezizomycete systematics, with an emphasis on truffles. She has been working in the teaching program, and as a fungarium manager and research scientist in Matthew Smith’s Lab at the University of Florida since 2015.

March 2

7 PM

This is an online MycoConsortium presentation. Details will be emailed to members a few days before the presentation.

 Donald Pfister
Topic: The Uses of Herbaria/Fungaria

Using examples from research that has been done on specimens from the Farlow fungarium Don will outline how these specimens contribute to modern taxonomic and systematic studies and how curatorial practices contribute to or distract from accurate study of collections. How was it possible to determine that a species suspected to be extinct was found to be widespread in eastern North America? What can collections tell us about the high and unexpected diversity of species of an often-collected genus of tropical fungi? Where was Charles Wright when he collected Puccinia triarticulata and how did he get there? These and other questions will be examined through the eye of a long serving curator.

Bio: Dr. Donald Pfister has been at Harvard University and the Farlow Library and Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany since 1974, after having been at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez from 1971. His Ph.D. was from Cornell University where he worked with Richard P. Korf. Aside from various administrative roles, his activities at the Farlow have centered on teaching and research, mostly on Ascomycota (Pezizomycetes, Leotiomycetes and Laboulbeniomyces), and stewardship of the Farlow collections. Over his career he has not only been responsible for the Farlow collections, but he also served as director of the entire Harvard University Herbaria, which numbers nearly 6 million specimens. The Farlow collections, which include not only fungi and lichenized fungi but also algae and bryophytes, include about 1.5 million specimens. He has written several books and articles dealing with collections. In all of these he has melded his research on fungi with the history and documentation of collections.

This is a bonus online MycoConsortium presentation at a special time. Details will be emailed to members a few days before the presentation.

Noah Siegel
Topic: Under Pressure: Evolution Oddities in the Fungal World 

March 16

7 PM

March 17

6:30 PM

March 30

7 PM

April 13

7 PM

April 30

Time: TBD