Kathryn E. Bushley

Kathryn E. Bushley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Minnesota. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College; MS from Duke School of the Environment; and PhD in mycology in the Department of Plant Pathology at Cornell University under the supervision of Dr. Gillian Turgeon. Kathryn’s research focuses on the evolution, genetics, and functional characterization of fungal secondary metabolites.  She utilizes next-generation technologies and comparative genomic approaches to characterize microbial genomes and transcriptomes, and to investigate the roles of metabolites in the interactions of fungi with other organisms (animals, insects, plants, and other fungi). 

Current work builds on her PhD research investigating the evolution of nonribosomal peptide synthetases in fungi and postdoctoral work under the supervision of Dr. Joey Spatafora at Oregon State University on genome sequencing and comparative genomic analyses of insect pathogenic fungi and focuses on characterizing diversity, secondary metabolites, and mechanisms of pathogenesis of fungal parasites of nematodes. Kathryn has taught mycology to graduate students at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, honors and freshman seminars in Microbiomes at Oregon State University and University of Minnesota, and Genetics for biology majors at the University of Minnesota.  She has been a member of the Mycological Society of America since 2001 and served as Genetics and Molecular Biology Councilor from 2015-17 and the Specific Expertise Committee on Genetics & Cell Biology from 2014-18.