Stefanie Pöggeler Editor

Stefanie Pöggeler (born 1963) studied Biology at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum (Germany). In 1993, she graduated with a thesis on intron-encoded polypeptides in plastids and mitochondria under the supervision of Prof. Ulrich Kück. She later on completed her “Habilitation” at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2000 and was awarded the Venia Legendi in Botany. Between 2001 and 2003 she had a stand-in assistant professorship in Botany at the Wilhelms Universität in Münster (Germany). In 2006 she was appointed as professor for Genetics of Eukaryotic Microorganisms at the Georg-August Universität Göttingen (Germany).
Her work is focused on the analysis of mating type genes and autophagy in sexual development of filamentous ascomycetes. In a second line of research, she is interested in the evolution of fungal inteins.

Timothy Y. James (born 1973) studied Biology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina (United States of America) in the lab of Prof. Rytas Vilgalys. He graduate in 2003 with a thesis on the evolution of mating-type genes in mushroom forming fungi. He completed postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University, Uppsala University (Sweden), and McMaster University (Canada) before starting as an assistant professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan (U.S.A.). He is the Curator of Fungi at the University of Michigan Fungarium (MICH) and is the Lewis E. Wehmeyer and Elaine Prince Wehmeyer Chair in Fungal Taxonomy. His work is focused on resolving the fungal tree of life, in particular discovering the hidden phylogenetic diversity of the tree by analysis of zoosporic and unculturable lineages of fungi. He is also interested in the evolution of ploidy and mitotic recombination.