Daniele Armaleo

I came to Duke University from Italy as a graduate student and never left Duke, where I am now an Associate Professor of the Practice of Biology in the Biology Department and teach undergraduate lab courses in Molecular and Cell Biology. Although I worked with fungi most of my life, I came to love lichens late in my career, inspired by Chicita Culberson, a world-class lichen chemist working in the Biology Department. Together with many collaborators, we just completed the first comprehensive lichen genome project on both alga and fungus of the lichen Cladonia grayi, and this project on the function of lichen introns is the first test of an idea born of that genome analysis. A large component of my research is done by undergraduates, and I consider sparking their interest in research my main mission as a professor.

June 2014