January Speaker | Alan Rockefeller : Mushrooms of Ecuador

Please join us on January 20th for our first meeting of 2026!

FFSC members gather together on the third Tuesday of the month from September through May to catch up, discuss club business, and learn from interesting speakers. Plus, you can bring any fungi you have been lucky enough to find for identification!

Would you like to get to know this month's speaker better? Join us for Dinner with the Speaker at 5pm, prior to this event.

About the Speaker

Alan Rockefeller is an expert mycologist in high demand at mushroom events where he teaches workshops on DNA barcoding, field photography, and fungal microscopy. In 2022 alone, Alan traveled the continent in synchrony with the mushroom seasons, and spoke at over 50 events in the span of a single year.

Committed to his cause, Alan has been studying fungal diversity for more than two decades, and since 2001 he has photographed more than 2,500 species of fungi. In order to discover new fungi, and spark interest in the hearts and minds of those new to the

field, Alan regularly leads forays all over North America, including Mexico where he has been studying the mushroom diversity for 15 years and is consequently bilingual.

Alan’s contributions to community science have been widespread, and his dedication to teaching thousands of people over several years how to extract and amplify the DNA of their mushroom finds for sequencing is remarkable, and remains unparalleled. Eventually Alan hopes to be able to offer free barcoding services to the mycology community via his newest endeavor into Nanopore sequencing. As of today, Alan has uploaded more than 700 of his own fungal DNA sequences to Genbank, and he is a co-author on several scientific papers, including publications documenting new species of bioluminescent Mycena and Psilocybe.

Alan is also devoted to the art of macroscopic mushroom identification and legitimately spends hours each day identifying mushrooms for the general public. Amazingly, he has identified over 250,000 fungi on websites like iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, and various Facebook Groups. Nothing short of a powerhouse, Alan Rockefeller is an authority on the leading edge of mycology, who is beloved by his community for the knowledge and value he contributes to the field.