was born in Michigan in 1968 where he enjoyed a blissfully non-intellectual childhood in an auto-worker community where school was shunned and fishing and hunting elevated to the highest level. Annual family forays to harvest morel mushrooms in Northern Michigan initiated a life-long passion for all things fungal. His fascination with fungi eventually led to a fondness for the fungal-like ... Read moreand he's been studying Phytophthora since 1997. Much to his wife and 3 children's dismay, every supermarket vegetable bin is a potential Phytophthora treasure chest. In addition to the local supermarket, he's collected Phytophthora from sites across the US, the Amazonian high jungle of Peru, southern France, Vietnam, and multiple provinces in China, including Hainan Island. Since 2001, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Show Less