The Speaker:  Anne Pringle was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and spent her childhood traveling through Southeast Asia and West Africa. After being dragged along on one-too-many birding expeditions, she abandoned the birds for fungi. She got her Ph.D. in Botany and Genetics at Duke University. After completing a Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the faculty at Harvard University. She next moved to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is now a Vilas Distinguished Achievement and the Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor in the Departments of Botany and Bacteriology. Pringle has given over 180 talks to academic and popular audiences in countries including China, Colombia, France, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. 

She has been awarded the Alexopoulos Prize for a Distinguished Early Career Mycologist (2010), the Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Harvard University Graduate Student Council (2011), the Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching from Harvard University (2013), a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship (2011-2012), the Mid-Career Mycorrhiza Research Excellence Award from the International Mycorrhiza Society (2019), and a Fulbright U.S. Scholarship (2022-2023, taken to South Africa). She is a National Geographic Explorer.  In 2019, Pringle was elected President of the Mycological Society of America. 

To see Pringle talk about fungi, invasion by death caps, and the microbiomes of pitcher plants, please visit the ibiology website: https://www.ibiology.org/speakers/anne-pringle/ . To read her publications and see her lab’s video about working with fungi please visit her laboratory website: https://pringlelab.botany.wisc.edu/.