Aquatic Mushrooms

Syrena Whitner is a fifth-year PhD candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She received her BS in Integrative Biology from Michigan State University in 2018, where her love of fungi and symbioses began while studying lichen ecology and secondary chemistry in the MSU Herbarium. Following graduation, Syrena moved to San Diego where she joined the Gerwick lab at Scripps Institute of Oceanography studying secondary metabolite production and biosynthetic gene clusters in marine cyanobacteria. Combining her love for fungi and the ocean, she pursued her PhD in the Amend lab where her thesis is centered on marine fungal ecology, specifically their role in the marine carbon cycle. Her current research utilizes metatranscriptomics and fluorescence microscopy to characterize fungal metabolic activity, associations with other microorganisms, community composition, and succession of both parasitic and saprotrophic fungi from pelagic ecosystems. In her free time, Syrena can be found surfing, hiking, traveling, or drinking coffee with her friends.