Congratulations to the Homola scholarship winners!

The NEMF Homola Scholarship committees made its choices this year choosing seven winners from a good number of applications. The winners include three promising young mycologists from the our club: Bella Catanzano, Victoria Bayevskiy and Matthew Rozanoff.

Bella Catanzaro is an upcoming senior year at the New School studying Environmental Studies and Interdisciplinary Science. She is fascinated by the crossroads and mesh of science and art. I see fungi as a beautiful, mysterious, and guiding entry point for us (humans) to learn how diverse life on this planet really is. Fungi break rules, adapt, and work in community to thrive, once we are able to care about lifeforms that are so unique and different from our own, we can recognize how precious life really is! And use that love for life to fight for better protection of our Earth.

Matthew Rozanoff is an active member of NYMS, sequence validator for FUNDIS, microscopist and developer of an interactive key for gilled fungi. He is also a winner of the Gary Lincoff scholarship last year. He is casually intense about finding every fungus he can.

Victoria Bayevskiy is a recent graduate from Stony Brook University with a BS in Psychology and a minor in Ecosystems and Human Impact. She is also the founder and President of Stony Brook’s first Foraging and Mycology Society, a club that starts the conversation about safe foraging and mushroom identification. She is interested in the intersection of psychology and sustainability in our changing world, and hopes to pursue this further.

We congratulate the winners!