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Wade Fox
Wade Fox is a koji fermentation specialist, currently developing fermented products and workshops for Bluestem Hollow Farms. He is an avid forager, home cook, and has a penchant for making culinary puns.
Eleana Hsu
Owner at Shared CulturesEleana Hsu is a small-batch producer in San Francisco specializing in using koji, an ancient fungus, to create newly imagined ferments through her business Shared Cultures. Inspired by traditional fermentation methods, wild-foraged mushrooms and the bounty of Northern California, she and her partner Kevin Gondo are creating farm-to-ferment misos, shoyus and umami seasonings using the magic of koji.
Olga Katic
Owner at Mushroom MountainI grew up mushroom hunting with my relatives in Bosnia and Hercegovina. When our parents were at work, our grandma watched my sister and I and we had the freedom of being in the woods all day long. At one moment we would be digging up leeches out of the fresh water well and feeding them to chickens, and the next moment, we would get chased by grandma’s rooster. But we also spent a lot of time picking boletes, milkies, and other varieties of mushrooms. We’d bring them to grandpa, and he would get rid of the ones he thought were not edible, the rest we would cook on the wood stove and eat them.
Skip to now. I am the proud owner of Mushroom Mountain and have an amazing team working with me. We produce mushroom spawn for many different edible and medicinal varieties. We also make several different medicinal mushroom extracts and medicinal mushroom honeys under the name Mycomatrix. Mushroom Mountain also runs a Wild Mushroom Food Safety Certification Program. This program was accepted by Health Departments of 7 states and counting, as well as being endorsed by the FDA.
Jeff Manganaro
Owner at Appalachiangold FungiCordyceps hunter and breeder working to develop methods to use these fungi in ways that are mutually beneficial to people fungi and the environment
Karen Milnes
Owner at Cabin CrittersKaren has a studio art degree from the University of Virginia with a concentration in printmaking. Cabin Critter Designs is her print shop and studio in the Highlands of Virginia, specializing in logo design, functional art and home décor. Often inspired by her surroundings, her work trends towards natural subjects and colors and spans many mediums, but she is always willing to try something new.
Pat Mitchell
Cofounder & President of Blue Ridge Mycological SocietyPat Mitchell is a self-taught amateur mycologist. Originally from a suburb outside of Chicago, he now lives with his wife and three children in central Virginia where, in 2018, he became the cofounder and president of the Blue Ridge Mycological Society. Mitchell also works with the Lynchburg Parks & Rec. as the Mycology Communicator, teaching basic mycology courses, for residents and nonresidents of Lynchburg.
Mandie Quark
Foray Chair at NAMAMandie Quark, the self-proclaimed Mushroom Madman, walked barefoot to receive her Bachelor’s in Chemistry from a tiny eclectic Honors College situated on a historic Maryland river in 2007. She spent the first part of her career studying molecular biology in academia, meanwhile culturing a healthy fascination with mycology on the side. For more than a decade she worked as a biomedical research scientist in Philadelphia at a Top-100 Hospital. There, while earning her Masters degree in Biochemistry from the University of the Sciences, she preformed high throughput screening in a chemical genomics lab. Mandie made the decision to hang up her academic lab coat in 2018 to pursue an alternative career path - including taking macro photos of mushrooms and explaining the mysteries and complexities of molecular mycology to the public. She has been a featured guest on many podcasts. Her series of advanced classes for mycologists were well received by the community. In 2023 Mandie started several new collaborations and is extremely excited about what her future in fungi will hold.
Alan Rockefeller
Co-owner at Mycena, LLC.Alan Rockefeller is an expert mycologist in high demand at mushroom events where he teaches workshops on DNA barcoding, field photography, and fungal microscopy. In 2022 alone, Alan traveled the continent in synchrony with the mushroom seasons, and spoke at over 50 events in the span of a single year. Committed to his cause, Alan has been studying fungal diversity for more than two decades, and since 2001 he has photographed more than 2,500 species of fungi. In order to discover new fungi, and spark interest in the hearts and minds of those new to the field, Alan regularly leads forays all over North America, including Mexico where he has been studying the mushroom diversity for 15 years and is consequently bilingual. This March Alan conducted field work in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador where he sparked collaborations with several field researchers and even helped the national herbarium identify their accessioned specimens. Alan’s contributions to community science have been widespread, and his dedication to teaching thousands of people over several years how to extract and amplify the DNA of their mushroom finds for sequencing is remarkable, and remains unparalleled. Eventually Alan hopes to be able to offer free barcoding services to the mycology community via his newest endeavor into Nanopore sequencing. As of today, Alan has uploaded more than 700 of his own fungal DNA sequences to Genbank, and he is a co-author on several scientific papers, including publications documenting new species of bioluminescent Mycena and Psilocybe. Alan is also devoted to the art of macroscopic mushroom identification and legitimately spends hours each day identifying mushrooms for the general public. Amazingly, he has identified over 250,000 fungi on websites like iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, and various Facebook Groups. Nothing short of a powerhouse, Alan Rockefeller is an authority on the leading edge of mycology, who is beloved by his community for the knowledge and value he contributes to the field.