Agaricus of North America

Richard Kerrigan

Friday March 25, 2022 at 7 PM

Links to this and other Consortium sponsored presentations are provided to MAW members by email notices and can be found by members on our Consortium Presentations page.

Topic Scope:   

Richard will introduce us to the Agaricus genus and how it is organized taxonomically and phylogenetically, followed by a series of interesting and/or representative examples of Agaricus species in North America. Where possible, he'll emphasize the Agaricus species local to the Northeast.

About Richard Kerrigan

Richard W. Kerrigan was born and raised in California. He became interested in Agaricus in 1971, after meeting David Arora while both were undergraduates at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  He earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at San Francisco State University (1976, 1982, with mentor Harry Thiers), a doctorate from University of California, Santa Barbara (1989), and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto (1989-1991).  From 1991-2017, Kerrigan held the position of Director of Research, USA, with Sylvan Inc, the world’s leading producer of cultivated mushroom spawn, where he worked on breeding improved strains of cultivated mushrooms. His study of the diversity, taxonomy, systematics and phylogeny of wild species of Agaricus continues as a separate, independent area of research now extending over 50 years.