FFSC Scholarship Awarded to Christian Schwarz
For all of you who took part in our very successful 2011 Fungus Fair—this is what we do it for! FFSC has awarded a scholarship to Christian Schwarz in support of his pending work on the UCSC Fungal Herbarium Sub-curator and Mass Sequencing Initiative.
Marje Young
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March 2, 2011
Christian Schwarz
Christian is becoming well known and well respected for his mycological knowledge. The project will benefit us locally and members of the Fungus Federation will have access to the herbarium research collection. This is indeed a worthwhile project that we are delighted to be able to fund.
Over the past few years, Christian has contributed over 400 micro fungal items to the herbarium collection at UC Santa Cruz. He will be working with the entire fungal collection (approximately 700 items) to move it into proper herbarium boxes; scan and digitize academic collection notes; create database of the text descriptions, with reference to the herbarium specimens; establish and develop a website for collection descriptions, photographs and academic notes (with international access); partner with the UCSC Gilbert Lab and UC Berkeley to obtain DNA sequencing of the collec-
tion; and complete an interactive polychotomous key to macro fungi.
The herbarium, including its online presence, will be of
significant value to the local scientific, taxonomic, and
enthusiast communities, as well as state and international researchers. !is will be especially true given that a large proportion of the collections will come accompanied with DNA sequence data.
Marje Young and Phil Carpenter
Scholarship Committee
