2020 January General Meeting: Roo Vandegrift

Please join us for our General Meeting at the Harvey West Scout House.  Refreshments will be provided and informal mushroom ID from 7:00 - 7:30.  A discussion of upcoming events will precede our speaker, Roo Vandegrift.  Doors open at 6PM

His topic — “Shut the Front Door! The Microbiome Inside Your Home!” Roo notes that your home, like your body, is an ecosystem that contains an intricate array of micro-organisms, including fungi! We live in intimate association with thousands of species of bacteria and fungi. Roo will describe the results of an EPA funded study he conducted that focused on the composition and structure of indoor microbial communities. Roo will also share the trailer of a film currently in production “Marrow of the Mountain” documenting the truly life-changing work he and his colleague are doing to document species diversity and to preclude massive mining initiatives in the cloud forest reserves in Amazonian Ecuador. This work will take your breath away!

Roo finished his PhD in 2016 in Dr. Bitty Roy’s lab at the University of Oregon, with a fair bit of shared advising by Dr. George Carroll. In 2013, he participated in NSF’s East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute (EAPSI) program in Taiwan, where he was able to work with the incomparable Xylariaceae taxonomist Dr. Yu-Ming Ju. Since receiving his doctorate, Roo has been working as a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment Center, studying the interface between fungal ecology and building science. Currently, he is working on a large EPA funded study examining the impacts of home weatherization on the microbial (fungi and bacteria) communities found in household dust, among other things.