Get excited about fungi? You will with this professor.
Associate Professor Lori Carris, in the Department of Plant Pathology, smiles and gestures widely when she describes leading her undergraduate students into mycology, the study of the colorful world of fungi. “How can you not be excited?” she asks. There are 1.5 million species of fungi in the world, many of them inside our bodies.
Carris uses fungi to teach the scientific method, and how to think critically. In her science course for non-science majors, Molds, Mildews, Mushrooms, the 5th Kingdom, students explore how fungi impact human history and their daily lives. Don’t be surprised to hear discussion of toenail fungus, smuts, and magic mushrooms. And to examine the larger, real-world impact of mold, as in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath in New Orleans, where thousands of homes were made unlivable by common household fungi.
Off to China to deal with smuts
Also a Plant Pathologist, Carris leads research into fungi and the growing scientific study of their role as pathogens in both the animal and plant worlds. Because of her twenty-year study of a plant pathogenic fungi called “smuts” that affects grasses such as wheat, she is one of the few people in the world who can identify smut spores that contaminate commercial grass seed crops.
China imports a great deal of one of the Pacific Northwest’s major plant exports, seed for Kentucky Bluegrass. Because the Chinese fear contamination of their agriculture by smut spores sometimes found in grass seed, Carris has made trips to China to assist their quarantine officials in determining what risk, if any, the spores hold for Chinese crops.
Musical mycology
Her goals are for students to gain a greater appreciation for the biological world and become better-educated citizens, able to assess things they read in the news (i.e. Katrina) and encounter in their lives (i.e. a mold report in a house they want to buy).
But there’s fungi fun to be had, too. Carris delights in her students. “They’re amazing, so engaged.” One non-science student, a music composition major, wrote a song about fungi. That kind of engagement speaks to her department’s approach to undergraduate studies: Students are taught by professors, not teaching assistants, and they have the opportunity to stay around after class and talk with the professors. Or hum a tune.
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