PhD candidate Lotus Lofgren, who uses MSI resources as part of the group of Associate Professor Peter Kennedy (Plant and Microbial Biology), was recently awarded the J.L. Harley Medal from the International Mycorrhiza Society. This award is given to a graduate student for excellence in research and presentation at the Society’s annual conference.
The Kennedy group uses MSI resources to perform molecular-based identification of fungi. This work is computationally expensive, requiring the use of Mesabi and Itasca. Ms. Lofgren presented a poster, Estimating fungal copy number variation in silico from short read genomic data, at the 2017 MSI Research Exhibition last April.
An article about Ms. Lofgren and her research can be found on the College of Biological Sciences website: A fondness for fungi.