Current Lab Members
Laura Aldrich-Wolfe
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
I am interested in questions of coexistence in community ecology. A single plant’s root system may be occupied by hundreds of species. What roles do these species play? To what extent is a community a product of chance rather than the outcome of species interactions? To what extent do closely related species play equivalent or divergent roles within the rhizosphere. Do abiotic and biotics factors differ in importance in structuring communities across biomes? I enjoy asking questions of broad importance to community ecology within the context of the rhizosphere fungal community, using landscape-scale studies, molecular biology, and manipulative experiments. While I seek to deepen our knowledge of the largely invisible world beneath our feet, I also hope to inform decision-making about land use by policy-makers, ranchers and farmers.
Ankita Sawant
Graduate Student
Ankita is a Master’s student in Environmental and Conservation Sciences. Her areas of interest include ecology and conservation. She completed her Bachelor of Science in Biology at the University of Wyoming in 2020, where she worked under the Wyoming EPSCoR in the Ecology Biogeochemistry Core Laboratory, studying the variation in microbial populations. She also worked with the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database (WYNDD) as an invertebrate technician. In her senior year of college, she worked on a methods comparison research project for soil analyses. Apart from work, she enjoyed being a Global Student Ambassador at UW because she could help people and also make a lot of friends. In her free time, she likes to sketch, go hiking or read fun research papers!
Jeffrey Lackmann
Graduate Student
Jeffrey is a Masters student in Environmental and Conservation Sciences. He grew up in Moorhead and Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where he still spends much of his free-time fishing, hunting mushrooms, and reading and writing poetry. He completed his undergraduate degree at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa and his primary research interest is the interplay between fungi, insects, and plants in ecosystems. A few of his other passions include writing and playing music, reading postmodern fiction, Vipassana meditation, and drinking chamomile tea.
Hanna Zastoupil
Mikenzie Vinje
Alex Hoffman and Max Pergande
Michael Fisher
Jake Schumacher
Cooper Klotzbach
Jesse Gallagher
Keith Stueve
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Previous Lab Members
Alison Long
Graduate Student
Alison completed her Master’s degree in Environmental and Conservation Sciences at NDSU in 2021 and is currently a Science Fellow at The Nature Conservancy. Studying mycorrhizal communities allows her to combine her interests in botany, mycology, and ecology. Her master’s thesis examines the relationship between fungal communities in Montana and Minnesota associated with the wildflower Gaillardia aristata and how soil phosphorus affects those communities. Alison received her Bachelor’s degree from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania and has spent time volunteering at organic farms and an herbarium, earning her Permaculture Design Certificate, and working on research at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Outside of the lab, she loves to camp, canoe, and hike and can often be found reading, developing her GIS skills, or marveling at the wonders of the plant and fungal worlds.
Olivia Hamilton
Olivia joined the lab in the summer of 2017 and worked in the lab throughout the 2017-2018 school year. Besides becoming a wizard at DNA extractions, Olivia mastered scoring roots for AM fungal colonization and conducting data analysis for a project examining fungal community composition on neotropical birds in the coffee agroecosystem. She graduated from Concordia College in 2018 and completed her Master’s in Plant Pathology at North Dakota State University in 2021.
Marissa Spear
Marissa conducted field work in Costa Rica in Spring 2017. After graduating from NDSU, Marissa embarked on graduate studies in botany at the University of Minnesota at Duluth.
Eliza Hartmann
Eliza conducted summer research in the lab from 2011-2012 and was part of the second coffee field crew in Costa Rica. She presented research on prairie arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities at the North American Congress for Conservation Biology in 2012 and on effects of coffee field management on AM fungal communities in Costa Rica at the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Minneapolis in 2013. Eliza graduated from Concordia College in 2013 and currently works as a fashion model in New York City.
Peter G. Johnson
Peter was part of the second coffee field crew in Costa Rica and worked in the lab during the summer of 2012. After graduating from Concordia College, Peter completed his Doctor of Physical Therapy at the Mayo Clinic and is now a practicing physical therapist.
Riley McGlynn
Riley conducted summer research in the lab in 2011 and was part of the first coffee field crew in Costa Rica. He graduated from Concordia College in 2012 and completed his Ph.D. in nematode genomics at the University of North Dakota in 2018.
Philip Nelson
Karley conducted field research with the lab in Minnesota and Montana in the summer of 2015. She recently completed one Master’s degree in Theological Studies at Boston College and is now launched on a second in Mental Health Counseling.
Sydney Redmond (Not pictured)
Logan Schmaltz
Logan conducted summer research in the lab in 2011 and was part of the first coffee crew in Costa Rica. After a stint in New Mexico, Logan returned to the Upper Midwest to pursue a degree in medicine at the University of North Dakota.
Gaya Shivega
Gaya worked as an undergraduate researcher in the lab from 2013-2015. She conducted an independent research project on the interactions of soil nitrogen with soil microbial availability in determining invasion success in grasslands, which was published in AoB Plants in 2017. She also played an instrumental role in high-throughput sequencing of coffee root fungal communities and conducted field work on arbuscular mycorrhizal communities across land use types in northwestern Minnesota. She began medical school at Georgetown University, Washington, DC in Fall 2017.
Anna Stasko, not pictured
Elizabeth (Libby) Sternhagen
Libby conducted research on root and soil fungal communities of coffee and native Rubiaceae in Costa Rica from 2016-2018 and completed her master’s degree in Environmental and Conservation Sciences in Fall 2018. She is currently a research biologist and lab manager at the Sperry Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and US Army ERDC-CERL.
John Baggerly
John was a master’s student in Environmental and Conservation Sciences in Fall 2017. In Spring 2018 he left the lab to pursue new adventures.
Sarah Curran and Olivia Hamilton
Previous Lab Assistants
Sarah Curran (middle) and Olivia Hamilton (left) joined the lab in Summer 2017. They both graduated from Concordia College in 2018. Sarah works in natural resource management and Olivia began a Master’s in Plant Pathology at NDSU in Fall 2019.
Katie Black
Katie joined the lab after her freshman year, completed the high-throughput sequencing and molecular ID of coffee root fungal communities, and presented the results of all her hard work at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Kentucky in 2014 and the Association for Tropical Biology & Conservation in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2015. She graduated from Concordia College in Biology and Environmental Studies in 2016, worked with GreenCorps in St. Paul, Minnesota and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Alec Boike
Alec conducted field work on mycorrhizas of prairie plants in Minnesota and Montana in the summer of 2015 and graduated from Concordia College in 2017.
Heather Campbell
I worked in the lab during the summer of 2013 and the 2014-2015 school year. We worked to discover the difference in AMF richness between native and restored prairies, with the long term goal of helping to restore prairies. We also collaborated with University of Minnesota researchers on a project involving AMF and the growth of native plants to be used as biofuels. After graduating from Concordia in Spring 2016 I worked in a lab at the University of Minnesota researching CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cells as a potential immunotherapy for cancer. I just started graduate school in immunology in fall 2017. I hope to become a professor after I receive my PhD and continue to do research.
Rebecca Asheim
Becca worked in the lab during summer and fall 2012 and summer 2013, conducting molecular work for coffee root fungi and fieldwork on effects of land use on AM fungi in northwestern Minnesota. She graduated from Concordia College in May 2015 and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Health.
Kristi Del Vecchio
Kristi conducted summer research in the lab and at the Long Lake Field Station near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota in the summer of 2011. She presented results of our research on land use effects on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities of northwestern Minnesota at the North American Conference for Conservation Biology in Oakland, California in 2012. She is currently working on her Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Tanner Dockendorf
Sadie Fliegel (not pictured)