Ankita successfully defended her Master’s thesis in July 2023 and is off to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for her Ph.D. We wish her the best!
Ankita was awarded the Cross Ranch Fellowship at North Dakota State University for her proposed Master’s work on the role of mycorrhizas and seed source on establishment success of blanketflower in a prairie reconstruction. Nice work, Ankita!
Jeffrey Lackmann was awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Well-earned, Jeffrey!
Laura was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER grant to study “Coffee fungi below and aboveground: agroecological experiments for teaching and learning about fungal diversity and ecosystem function.” This grant represents a terrific opportunity to train graduate and undergraduate students alongside Costa Rican collaborator Dr. Priscila Chaverri Echandi at the Universidad de Costa Rica in studying functional roles of fungi in agroecological systems.
Elena Prado-Ragan joined the Aldrich-Wolfe Lab in January 2021, just in time for the Organization for Tropical Biology’s graduate field course in Costa Rica. She will be working on her Master’s as part of our NSF EAGER grant to study movement of fungal spores by wind and birds between forest fragments and coffee farms in southern Costa Rica.
Welcome Ankita Sawant and Jeffrrey Lackmann to North Dakota State University! Both Ankita and Jeffrey will be working on their Master’s theses in Environmental and Conservation Sciences and are currently developing their research proposals. Ankita plans to focus on mycorrhizal aspects of conservation for the wildflower Gaillardia aristata, a species of special concern in Minnesota. Jeffrey plans to combine his interests in decomposition, fungi and insects.
An NSF EAGER grant to Laura Aldrich-Wolfe will provide two years of funding for us to study fungal dispersal between coffee farms and forest in southern Costa Rica in collaboration with Dr. Priscila Chaverri at the Universidad de Costa Rica, Dr. Catherine Lindell at Michigan State University, and Dr. Benedicte Bachelot at Oklahoma State University.
The Aldrich-Wolfe Lab is currently recruiting a graduate student for Spring 2021 interested in studying dispersal of plant-associated fungi by wind and birds in coffee-forest agroecosystems of southern Costa Rica. The ideal student would have experience mistnetting birds, solid communication skills in Spanish, and a passion for learning more about the ecology of plant diseases in the tropics. If interested, submit your curriculum vitae, a brief statement of interest, contact info for two academic references, and unofficial transcripts as a single pdf file to laura.aldrichwolfe at ndsu.edu.
Thanks to Dr. Stefanie Vink and all the amazing undergraduate students who made this paper happen. Kudos!
Aldrich-Wolfe, L., K. L. Black, E. D. L. Hartmann, W. G. Shivega, L. C. Schmaltz, R. D. McGlynn, P. G. Johnson, R. J. Asheim Keller, and S. N. Vink. 2020. Taxonomic shifts in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities with shade and soil nitrogen across conventionally managed and organic coffee agroecosystems. Mycorrhiza (DOI)10.1007/s00572-020-00967-7
Libby’s first chapter of her Master’s thesis was just accepted to Applied and Environmental Microbiology and is now officially in press!