About
My motivation for research has always been the desire to explore, document, and conserve the richness of nature, particularly its biological diversity. I have been using molecular methods to study fungal diversity at different levels: 1) systematics based on a combined molecular and morphological approach; 2) speciation studies using phylogeography, population genetics, and coalescent methods; and 3) landscape ecology of fungal communities using DNA metabarcoding. I acquired two independent Ph.D. degrees, one in Evolutionary Genetics and Plant Pathology at the Pennsylvania State University (2001-2004) and another in Mycology at the Corvinus University of Budapest in Hungary (1998-2005). I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (2004-2009) and at Leiden University in the Netherlands (2009-2011) before working at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center from 2011 to 2019 as a research scientist. I am currently the group leader of the MTA-EKE Lendület Environmental Microbiome Research Group, supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, at Eszterházy Károly University in Hungary. More information on my work can be found here.
In the Plant.ID project, I will act as co-supervisor of Marcel Polling. I have worked with DNA metabarcoding for more than 12 years and I am eager to contribute my expertise in bioinformatics, fungal taxonomy, and fungal ecology to this project.
