Let's get together VIRTUALLY! Mark your calendars and get ready to enjoy our August meeting from the comfort of your home! 

• Our President, Tom McCoy, will start us up with meeting business 
• Membership Chair, Tom Moore, will update us with "Fungi In the News"
• Former Programs Chair, Annie Weissman, will give us an overview of what is popping up with our virtual ID table, using YOUR observations on the iNaturalist Project
• Megan Romberg, Science Advisor, will announce the Sequanota scholarship recipients
• Prof. Emily Struckhoff will instruct us with a short presentation
• • Tricks to Protect Yourself from Tick Bites: 
  • If you have spent time outdoors in the Mid-Atlantic, you have probably encountered ticks. However, there are many steps that you can take to protect yourself from Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. During this program, attendees will learn about tick biology, the different species of ticks in the eastern United States, how ticks cause disease, and how to use this knowledge to prevent tick bites and tick-borne diseases.
  • Bio: Emily Struckhoff is an extension program specialist at Penn State Extension, where she focuses on vectors (like ticks and mosquitoes) and vector-borne diseases. She received her B.S. in Biology from Saint Louis University and her M.S. in Entomology from the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, where she conducted research on tick surveillance throughout Illinois. At Penn State Extension, Emily develops and delivers programming about ticks and mosquitoes throughout the state.

Featured Presentation by Dr. Conrad Schoch

Title: Demystifying DNA Sequences: A guide to the National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI) system

Description: You've got your mushrooms, dried them, and sent them for DNA analysis, now what? In this presentation Dr. Conrad Schoch will give us an overview of the world's biggest sequence database (GenBank) and other resources available for researchers everywhere trying to answer one of the oldest questions in the world: "what am I looking at?" 

Bio: Conrad Schoch is a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, USA since 2009. He acts as Team Lead for the NCBI Taxonomy Group and is also responsible for the curation of fungal names in GenBank and associated databases. He obtained his MSc. (Microbiology) at the University of the Free State in 1996, after which he completed his PhD in Plant Pathology in 1999 at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He was a postdoctoral scientist at Cornell University from 2000 to 2003 and at Oregon State University from 2003 to 2008 where he was responsible for sampling non-lichenised ascomycetes on the first Assembling the Fungal Tree of Life (AFTOL) project. He is also past Chair for the International Committee for Taxonomy of Fungi (ICTF).

Zoom Link:

https://zoom.us/j/96693690911?pwd=YWdyeXh1bHF1N1UyNjNieFovNWFUZz09

Meeting ID 966 9369 0911

Passcode  330827

One Tap Mobile +13017158592,,96693690911#,,,,*330827# US (Washington DC)

Find your local Zoom access number: https://us06web.zoom.us/u/kQ9hr47WO