My department is hiring a non-seed plant assistant professor!! Come join us @ubcbotany.bsky.social! BC has spectacular non-seed plant diversity and I would love to nerd out with a future colleague about all those cute little green guys outside! 💚 pls share! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31140

New paper from our lab! ⤵️

My fellow profs at 🇨🇦Canadian universities! Please take a moment to read and sign this letter urging the Federal government to align its economic plans with climate change action and resilience: sustainabilitydigitalage.org/featured/sus...

The one year anniversary of my arrival at UBC flew by a month ago. Thanks to fellow newPI and former grad school pal @mattolm.bsky.social for reminding me of one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned this past year: *make* time to reflect! Here are some reflections on my first year as a PI & prof… 🧵

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Please repost -- The Univ. California Davis dept of Plant Pathology is hiring a Fungal biologist / Mycologist Applications due Dec 1 Application portal: recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07339 Screenshot shows part of the job posting (with alt-text of the same text)

HELP WANTED! Calling all mycophiles in California, Oregon, Washington, or British Columbia! My research focuses on Laccaria amethysteo-occidentalis, pictured below. I need to collect mushrooms from wild and urban areas across its range. Plz send mushrooms if you find any! I can pay shipping 💜 🍄‍🟫

How is it possible that I only very recently learned about Hexaflexagons?! This is so bamboozlingly delightful! Math is just the coolest. vimeo.com/147799851

Sun is shining, birds are chirping, and a colleague just gave me a sack of 💩 (specifically some local alpine rabbit poops) …today is a good day and I officially have the best job ever!

Dear Microbial Ecologists - has anyone directly tested sampling effort spread out over time vs. space? For example, 100 samples collected at a single time-point, vs. 100 samples collected across multiple timepoints (neither time nor space are significant factors for community assembly/dynamics/etc.)

@biorender.bsky.social put numbers to the vibes in the US right now... "87% of labs affected or expecting disruption" 💔 www.biorender.com/2025-science...

Our newest special issue is now live! Check it out to discover more about diverse and beautiful Fungi🍄🍄‍🟫🍄 On the cover: the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, releasing its spores in the early morning light. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Teaching prep for fall motivated me to revisit the awesome Oral History For Mycology project on YouTube. So many great stories, but shout out to @benwolfe.bsky.social for highlighting this incredible Bray-Curtis ordination from 1969 by Martha Christensen. So cool. So glad we have computers now 😅

We are looking for a Postdoc in the LaBella Lab! Do you love fungi 🍄, genetics 🧬and bioinformatics 💻 - then this might be a good fit for you! jobs.charlotte.edu/postings/63307 Applications accepted through July 1

“Distribution of haploid chromosomes into separate nuclei in two pathogenic fungi”🍄🧬 a plot twist in the story of multinucleate filamentous fungi! Really cool and bizarre new work from the lab of Xin Li! @science.ubc.ca @ubcbotany.bsky.social @science.org www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Inaugural Fischer Fire Fungi Lab field trip was a huge success! We collected so many familiar faces (Pyronema, Geopyxis, Tricharina, etc.), learned a bunch about pyrophilous insects, and fell in love with the monsoon-moistened sagebrush/pine forests on the doorstep of BC’s desert landscape. ❤️‍🔥🍄‍🟫

What I wish I knew: 33 thoughts for early career researchers Reflections I wish someone had shared with me early in my research career. predirections.substack.com/p/what-i-wis...

I’m so incredibly proud of Hemi Patel for presenting her Master’s thesis today, and humbled that she chose me to serve on her committee. She cultivated, in rigorous detail, a feasible method for rethinking the way we build, inhabit, and think about architecture using mycomaterials! 🍄

I didn’t think it was possible, but I just reviewed a manuscript and I literally have no notes. It’s elegant. It’s concise. It’s crystal clear. I couldn’t even find a typo. Bravo authors!!! I can’t wait to hype up this manuscript once it’s officially published!!

🚨Report your NSF grant terminations! 🚨 We are starting to collect information on NSF grant terminations to create a shared resource as we have for NIH. The more information we collect, the more we can organize, advocate, and fight back! Please share widely! airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni...

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of the words and narratives that we choose to use because language is fundamentally how we communicate data, how we share our observations of the world, and how we connect with each other - there are big implications for scientific integrity and ethics… 🧵1/3

To combat long-overlooked fungal pathogens, researchers and regulators must embrace innovative science and policy https://go.nature.com/4jbh96j

What a fun way to get a glimpse of my lab! Huge thanks to Conlan, Nicole, Siddharth, and Jag for choosing to interview me about cell-cell communication and Neurospora for their SCIE300 class project! @science.ubc.ca read & watch here: medium.com/@leotard.tri...

Huge News! It’s official - my lab has been awarded the NSERC Discovery Grant! Funding 5 years of fabulous fire fungi research! ✨🔥🍄🧫🔬🧬🍁 Huge thanks to @science.ubc.ca and @ubcbotany.bsky.social for supporting me through this big milestone! 🤓 #NewPI

Most days setting up a new lab feel a bit like xmas, but today REALLY felt like xmas! If you hunt mushrooms in Cascadia - you need this book!! 🍄 Mushrooms of Cascadia 🍄‍🟫 by the exceptional Schwarz & Siegel 🙌

This job at UBC (Vancouver Campus) also looks amazing. forestry.ubc.ca/career-oppor...

About the importance of writing and how to do it; nice, short article in Nature Biotechnology, and not just for graduate students. rdcu.be/ee4Vt

Come visit us, plant friends!!! 🤗🌱

There’s an easter egg hidden in my PhD thesis… and now that I’m serving on student thesis committees, I’m honestly motivated to read their theses partially just to find out if anyone else had the same idea as me.

We're excited to invite everyone to the 24th Annual Microbiology Student Symposium on April 26th, 2025. Please join us for a day of research presentations, poster sessions, opportunities to network with local biotech companies, free food, and more! microstudentgroup.weebly.com/registration...

Walking through the set-up process for my new Agilent BioTek plate reader and the first time it extended it’s tray felt like a greeting, as if it was trying to say hello and shake my hand! Hello friend! Welcome! We’re going to do so much cool science together! 🤗

My friend found me a great resource for Spanish mushroom terms! Check it out! #FungiFriday www.setasdesiecha.com/partes-del-h...

Fully funded PhD in Plant Ecophysiology at UBC in Vancouver 🍁! Possible topics include leaf physiology, thermal ecology, microclimates, scaling, tree physiology, forest ecology & more. Start Jan/May/Sept 2026. michaletzlab.org Please share! #PlantEcoPhys #Ecology #Botany #PhDposition #GradSchool

Great seminar today from @mcstitzer.bsky.social and I’m now officially obsessed with this perspective that a genome is an ecosystem - just like the biogeography of organisms, whats the geography (geneography?!) of genes across genome(s)?!

Fabulous lichen seminar today from @spribille.bsky.social Lichens contain multitudes - a truly incredibly diversity of microbes that evolved a different solution to multicellularity besides the usual developmental programming. Metagenomics! Auxotrophy! Resource economics and microbial interactions!

Step 1: Spend the most money you’ve ever spent on any one thing (professionally or personally) Step 2: become a cat For real tho, I am AMPED for my labs new Agilent BioTek plate reader. Pretty sure it’s gonna be even more fun than the box it was shipped in, and it is a fun box.

Plant Biology faculty position @umontreal.ca @irbv.bsky.social : Assistant Professor in Quantitative Genetics www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Just had a fantastic journal club discussion about this epic @nature.com paper from @tobykiers.bsky.social +team that extremely thoroughly details the network architecture of an AM fungus. We especially appreciated the color-coded mathematical variables :) ...but also>> 🧵 1/3

DEI is under attack, but the stakes are higher than many realize. Universities *must stand firm* in defending it. I lay out why in my latest piece for Nature. Silence is complicity. Without DEI, we fail our students, our research, and our future. www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

I’d like to personally thank whoever invented image-to-text. I’ve been dreading transcribing all of these serial numbers, but then I realized I could just take a photo and copy&paste the serial numbers directly off the photo. 💫

This is, just the coolest! I hope to one day be fortunate enough to visit this delightful library 🥹

Attn: Canadian Colleagues - here's a letter where you can sign in solidarity with our US colleagues ❤️‍🔥✊🏼 ...what's happening to science in the US affects science everywhere 💔

Our newest research in @nature.com We built a robot (!) to track plant-fungal trade networks. By following half a million fungal highways & nutrient flows within them, we discovered how plants & fungi build hyper-efficient supply chains www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📹 @sasaspacal.bsky.social

Awesome seminar today from Juan Manuel Martinez who is visiting from CICESE - always such a feast of delightful Neurospora microscopy, and now we know there’s apical ER that snuggles with mitochondria! 🤯🤩

CERC’s are an awesome opportunity for senior scientists (e.g. full prof) to move to Canada! Specifically at UBC, we’re hoping to recruit someone working with mycomaterials/biomaterials - any suggestions?! 🍄 #mycofam

Super fun and easy way to chat with youth about (your) science! Started in the US, but looks like they’re global now! I’ve done it several times - love @skypeascientist.bsky.social !

My weekend read www.gutenberg.org/files/33346/...

Y'all. I feel like I couldn't make this up if I tried... I'm reviewing grad student applications, opened a letter of rec for one student, and realized I *know* the prof who wrote the letter... ~15-20 years ago I was living in Seattle, fire-dancing, chefing, and just barely getting into science 🧵1/4

BiologySky! How do you approach teaching about non-human structures that we’ve historically anthropomorphized as “male” and “female”, given that these words are arguably inaccurate and potentially exclusionary/uncomfortable for anyone aware of the current rise in violence against trans folks?

Happy #SuperbOwl Sunday!! …Behold! The adorable Burrowing Owl of North America