Research Expertise and Interest

fungal community dynamics, fungal genetics

Research Description

Lotus Lofgren is an ecologist interested in the mechanisms structuring fungal community dynamics, including host specificity, competition, guild plasticity, trait and genome evolution, and how these concepts intersect with ecological theory. To address these questions she uses two key approaches: Reverse Ecology- starting with genomes and working backwards to develop testable hypotheses, and Synthetic Ecology- using constructed communities to tractably manipulate complex consortia. This multidisciplinary strategy leverages comparative-, population- and phylo-genomics, computational bioinformatics, and laboratory experiments employing bioassays and molecular biology.

Before arriving at UC Berkeley, she completed a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota (2019), and then a two-year postdoc in fungal population genetics and evolutionary genomics in the Stajich Lab at the UC Riverside, before joining the Vilgalys Lab at Duke University for three years as a Tri-I MMPTP (NIH T-32) postdoctoral fellow.