What I’m up to
11 October 2024: It’s been nearly a year since I posted! Time has flown, and life shows no signs of slowing down. Loam Bio recently laid off most of its western hemisphere employees, and my role was affected. I’m currently looking for either 1) investments to start a fungal pharmaceuticals company or microbial freshwater carbon sequestration company or 2) research and development roles in biotechs in the Minneapolis, MN area or remote. Shoot me an email if you’d like to chat about any of this at carlyraeas@gmail.com!
9 November 2023: I PASSED MY DEFENSE! I’m officially Dr. Carly Anderson. Additional big news—I accepted a position with Loam Bio, a microbial carbon capture startup based between St. Paul (MN, USA) and Orange (New South Wales, Australia). I’ll be based in St. Paul as a research scientist on their R&D team in mid-December. Things are happening, ya’ll.
26 October 2023: I submitted my dissertation to my committee members yesterday morning. It really was a sprint to the finish line, but 150+ pages later I feel good about it and I’m excited to prep for the defense in early November. In the meantime, everything else in life is up in there. I’m still working with forestry at Trinchera, still interviewing at lots of fungal biotechs looking for that perfect fit, and still actively searching for funding for my own company. Life!
1 September 2023: SO many things happening.
It’s the last sprint to finish the dissertation in time for my defense in November, and I’m relishing every moment of it.
At the same time, I’m interviewing all over the country for jobs in psychedelic pharmaceuticals, microbial plastic degradation, mycelium meat production, and microbial carbon sequestration. Right now I’m in Chicago for an on-site interview and I’m loving the city so far!
I’m spearheading a fun applied-mycology project combining Trinchera Ranch forestry goals with a promising local high school student’s science fair project - that’s what I call a two-for-one! We’ll be looking at the fungal endophyte communities of spruce budworm-infected douglas fir and unaffected fir.
I’m also writing up a deck to present to potential investors in my own fungal biology biotech company. If you’re looking to invest in an innovative and biology-forward fungi startup, let me know…
28 July 2023: I just finished my PhD exit talk entitled “Tackling a large, global lichen genus: persistent unknowns, phylogenetic analyses, and climate correlates of Cladonia (lichenized Ascomycetes).” It went well, although I had to talk very fast to fit it all in! Check it out at this Zoom link (this will eventually expire). Special thanks to Stephen Mundo for organizing the CO Mycology Talk series!
5 July 2023: I’m currently working at the beautiful Trinchera Ranch in southern Colorado while I wrap up my dissertation chapters. This ranch provides an amazing opportunity to study the biodiversity of the world’s largest alpine valley (I’m also bartending and teaching yoga for the guests!). While I’m currently a seasonal employee here, I’m hoping to convince the biology team to let me set up and direct a fungal biology program. Dream big!
7 June 2023: Paper out! A diversity paper regarding some fun northern Alabama/Southern Appalachia lichen field work!
1 June 2023: I’m making many new changes and welcoming new opportunities! Although I’ll always be a supporter, I’ve recently left Meati to focus on completing my PhD and look for new opportunities in the world of industrial mycology and biodiversity conservation. I’ll always be grateful for the fantastic team and tremendous learning experience at Meati. My PhD will wrap up in fall 2023, and I’m on the lookout for opportunities in fungal pharmaceuticals, biodiversity studies, and fungal solutions to climate change.
31 January 2023: Meati is deep into scaleup of our demonstration facility…and it’s going great! In other news, I’m hoping to finish my dissertation early summer 2023. Things are changing! With all my extra time after the PhD (haha) I’m planning on enrolling in flight school.
25 June 2022: This past year has flown by…scaling up Meati is underway and we’re all working hard to make sure this company is a success! Check out Meati’s page for exciting updates…
I’m also continuing to work towards my PhD. COVID-related travel and facility shutdown snafus notwithstanding, things are happening slowly but surely.
20 May 2021: Catching you up: I started working at my side gig full time…Meati Foods! My work there has nothing to do with my PhD but they’re doing amazing, world-changing things and I’m extremely stoked to be a part of the team.
I’m also happy to report that I finally got the go-ahead to do field work in Baja California, MX! I won funding for this trip over a year ago but it’s been postponed due to COVID. In two weeks I’ll be flying to San Diego in a Cessna Cardinal, renting a car in Tijuana, and driving down the peninsula collecting Cladonia. I’ll be stopping to surf and drink Victorias as much as possible, of course.
31 August 2020: So much is happening…more updates soon! In the meantime, a report on my Hawaiian field work is in the latest ‘Elepaio, the Hawaiian Audubon Society’s newsletter.
30 April 2020: Haven’t posted any news for a while! Right now Erin Tripp and I are recording lichen videos in the Comanche National Grasslands and soon in the Mojave Desert–why? Because if we can’t bring students to the field for the Lichen Biome course this May,…then we’ll bring the field to them!
Also, I just got recognized by Wiley Publishing for having one of the top-read papers in Forest Pathology! See that paper here. Thanks to all the forest pathologists for reading about fungal endophytes!
2 April 2020: I won the CU Boulder Natural History Museum student research award! I’ll be using the funds to do a survey of Cladonia in Baja California (Mexico). Baja is a surprisingly heterogeneous peninsula environmentally, yet there are only a handful of Cladonia specimens recorded. Check out the Baja Herbarium (Herbario BCMEX) here, and check back for the museum’s announcement here.
13 December 2019: Paper out! Check my publications page for an awesome paper on Whole Genome Sequencing performance in lichens first-authored by my good friend and colleague Kyle Keepers.
25 September 2019: I sat on a discussion panel with the theme ‘Our love affair with mushrooms’ alongside a screening of the film Fantastic Fungi here in Denver (announcement here). Find out more about it and watch the trailer here.
14 October 2019: I gave a talk at the Denver Botanic Gardens in association with the Colorado Mycological Society. The talk was called “Lichen symbioses and the genus Cladonia".” Find out more details here.
14 August 2019: I won the AJ Sharpe Award from the American Bryological and Lichenological Society for my talk at Botany! Very excited to win this award, as public speaking is a skill I’ve really been working on. Check out the announcement here. Also, I’m currently a little over halfway through my collecting trip in New Caledonia. I’m spending my day off in Bourail and heading up to the Poindimié in the North Province this afternoon. The New Caledonian Mycological Society has been invaluable for helping me find sites and get acquainted with the land. I’m in debt to these wonderful people! Now I need to quickly learn French and come back for more collecting next year…
27 July 2019: I’m here at the Starr Pass Resort in Tucson, Arizona for Botany Conference 2019! Tomorrow I’ll be running around in the Santa Rita Mountains looking for lichens, but if you’re around come check out my talk on RADsequencing in Cladonia on Monday at 2:00pm.
3 July 2019: Quick update–Hawaiian lichen collecting went absolutely swimmingly. I’m ITCHING to identify those specimens but I need to concentrate on my analyses for a talk at Botany Conference at the end of this month. Coming up next month is a collecting trip to New Caledonia…and I’ll be giving a short talk with the Société Mycologique de Nouvelle-Calédonie in Nouméa. If you’re around come listen!
15 April 2019: Yay! I won an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Research Grant! This grant is especially important to me right now – it’s hard to find funding sources that allow researchers to use the grant money for lab costs; they often designate the money to be used for field work only. But then what do we do with all these specimens once we have collected from the field? My focus is fungal evolutionary biology so I have lots of sequencing to do….and sequencing is expensive even if you use a ‘cheaper’ method!
14 March 2019: WHOA! I just won the Garden Club of America Award in Tropical Botany! I’m going to New Caledonia to make a checklist of Cladonia lichens, assess whether historical species are still there, and perhaps find some new species! I’ve been dreaming of New Caledonia for a long time…I’m so happy to accept this award.
7 March 2019: I’ve been invited to do a talk at the Denver Botanic Gardens with the Colorado Mycological Society! The talk is happening in October, info here. It will be regarding Cladonia, but the actual title is TBD.
4 March 2019: Paper out! Check the Publications page for deets.
14 February 2019: The announcement for the Wild/Tame Art and Science Exhibition is up! We’ll be presenting our performative lecture “Stories from the Archive” at SEEC (CU Boulder East Campus) from 6-7pm on February 21st, 2019.
11 December 2018: I got the California Lichen Society Grant! The project is entitled “Are lichens always haploid? Challenging the dogma and confirming a novel reproductive possibility.” Can’t wait to squash some fungal chromosomes!
15 November 2018: Paper out! Check the Publications page to learn about a new species, Lecanora markjohnstonii!
4 November 2018: I won the Hawaiian Audubon Society grant! This grant will be used in conjunction with a grant from the Society of Systematic Botanists to collect endemic Cladonia on the Hawaiian archipelago. See the announcement here. #expeditiontohawaii
2 November 2018: I won a Graduate Student Research Award from the Society of Systematic Botanists! I’m going to Kauai and Maui, Hawaii, to find endemic and long-neglected species of Cladonia. Check out the full list of winners here.
15 October 2018: Paper out! Check the Publications page to learn about Scottish Sitka spruce endophytes.
27 September 2018: I’m giving a co-lecture with my colleague from New York in November, check out the Torrey Botanical Society’s lecture schedule here.
14 July 2018: I’m here in San Juan, Puerto Rico for the International Mycological Congress. This major congress gets mycologists from all over the world together in one place to present their research. I’ll be presenting a poster entitled “Cladonia: Assembling a global phylogeny using RADseq data optimized for metagenomic organisms.” I’m also going on a field trip/collecting trip to to El Yunque tomorrow!
Side note: I finally stumbled across the announcement from a cool art-science fellowship I’m part of and working on this summer. Check it out here.
18 June 2018: Both papers accepted with minor revisions! Keep an eye on my Publications page for their release.
5 June 2018: New post on the blog, and much madness has ended. The end of the semester came and went, and I helped TA the first-ever Lichen Biome class at CU Boulder over the last week. We went for a 4 day camping/field excursion down in southern Colorado to look at lichens in the wild.
26 April 2018: Paper out, and papers submitted! Check the Publications page for updates. I was in NYC collecting lichens in the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium for the last couple days, but now I’m headed to Pennsylvania for the annual Tuckerman Workshop, a week-long lichen adventure that brings lichenologists from all over the world together.
12 April 2018: Just got back from a trip to Beijing and Hong Kong. It was non-academic…but nonetheless saw some beautiful plants and fungi. Check my blog soon for some photos…
14 March 2018: My University of Colorado Certificate in College Teaching was accepted! The CCT requirements included a teaching portfolio, at least 20 hours of teaching workshops, and as many hours of discipline specific training in ecology and evolutionary biology.
4 February 2017: Just landed in New York City. I’m here for a week studying with my co-advisor James Lendemer at the New York Botanical Gardens (NYBG). Can’t wait to collect some genomic vouchers of Cladonia from their massive lichen collection…
29 January 2017: Check out the Publications page for some info on papers soon to be submitted…
15 December 2017: Turned in my teaching portfolio for CU’s Certificate in College Teaching today. Excited to do some more teaching in May when I TA a short and intense lichen course at CU.
13 December 2017: I just got back from a beautiful short trip to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee collecting lichens. Check out my blog for some photos!
17 August 2017: Paper out! Check out the “Publications” tab.
28 July 2017: Last day at the International Botanical Congress in Shenzhen, China. I’ve had an amazing time here in China, and I can’t wait to come back next year to show my mom around. Also attended the International Association of Bryologists’ meeting last night…undercover.
26 July 2017: This page was created.