ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
Kathleen Treseder On the Ubiquity of Fungi
For Kathleen Treseder, HBS’94, the launching pad for her career in science and research was Borneo, the giant, rugged island in Southeast Asia’s Malay Archipelago.
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Salt Lake City native and a first-generation college graduate, she didn’t know that universities did research. She soon found out otherwise. On a field trip together with plant ecologist Jim Ehleringer, he asked her if she wanted to go to graduate school. “You’ll need field experience,” he said. “Is there a field site you can go to? Borneo?” He told her to ask 4
Diane (Dinah) Davidson, who is now an SBS professor emerita. “So I prepared a whole speech on why I wanted to go,” says Treseder, thinking she was going to need to sell herself, “and I didn’t have a chance to say it to her.” Davidson just signed her up right out of the gate. It was the first time Treseder had traveled by herself away from the University, and it proved to be transformative for her. “It was a series of change encounters. Without Borneo
