NAMA Memorial Fellowship Recipient:Dimitri Floudas

The Mycophile, VOLUME 52 (3) May-June 2012

 

 VOLUME 52 (3) May-June 2012" " www.namyco.org

 

NAMA Memorial Fellowship Recipient:Dimitri Floudas

 

This year‘s recipient of the NAMA Memorial Fellowship given in  memory of Larry Stickney was awarded to Dimitri Floudas. He was selected by the Graduate Student Fellowship Committee of MSA to receive the prestigious NAMA Memorial Fellowship for 2012. Dimitri received his bachelor’s degree in Biology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2006. During the last year of his bachelor’s degree he completed his diploma dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Zacharoula Gonou-Zagou and Dr. Evangelia Kapsanaki-Gotsi, where he studied taxonomy and diversity of Agaricomycetes in central Greece and performed screening of basidiomycete isolates for their bioremediation potential, focusing particularly on lignicolous species. After his graduation he participated in two research projects at the University of Athens. His participation in the first project involved monitoring the diversity of lignicolous basidiomycetes in four distinct forest ecosystems in Greece, while during the second project he was testing the enzymatic ability of Phanerochaete chrysosporium and Pleurotus ostreatus to degrade recalcitrant organic phenolic compounds of oil mill waste water. Dimitri joined David Hibbett’s lab at Clark University in August of 2008 and since then he has been working on his PhD thesis focusing on the evolution of wood degrading systems in Agaricomycotina using comparative genomics. Additionally, he is working towards a modern taxonomic study of the genus Phanerochaete, a diverse and taxonomically perplexed genus in Polyporales, under the PolyPEET  NSF grant.

---