At the end of a gravel road off Game Farm Rd. on the outskirts of Cornell’s campus, stands a one-story white building housing the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, also known as CUP. As the fourth largest museum of fungi in North America, CUP hosts more than 400,000 fungal specimens as well as several ongoing research projects in mycology, the study of fungi. Beyond research, though, CUP is also home to a small community of students, researchers and volunteers, each with their own journey to mycology at Cornell.
For Teresa Iturriaga, the curator of CUP, fascination with these tiny mushrooms began during her doctoral studies in mycology at Cornell, under the guidance of the former Prof. Richard P. Korf, mycology.
In addition to her duties as the CUP curator, Iturriaga also conducts her own mycology research focusing on the Pezizaceae family of fungi, commonly known as cup fungi. However, when she first arrived at Cornell from her native Venezuela as a doctoral student, Iturriaga had never considered working with tiny mushrooms.
“I wanted to work with big fungi, like polyphores and agarics,” Iturriaga said. “But Professor Korf was a specialist in the small ones, and when I started looking at them under the microscope, I fell in love with them. Since then, I have dedicated all my life to their study.”
Currently, Iturriaga is working on a project reexamining one of Korf’s collections of cup fungi, gathered in the Canary Islands during the 1970s. At the time, Korf classified the specimens as belonging to the genus Lutremia, but further analysis suggests that the specimens may represent several previously unidentified species of fungi. With the help of undergraduate herbarium assistant Tommy Victor ‘25, Iturriaga is using DNA sequencing to determine whether Korf’s collection indeed contains new species.
For Iturriaga, connecting with other scientists is the most valuable part of mycology research. Of all her responsibilities at CUP, her favorite is mentoring students.
“The human connection is most important to me,” she said. “The connection with students, mainly, is invaluable. I always have three to four students working with me—not every day, not every time—but I want to teach them the admiration for the natural world.”
After collecting specimens from the small forest behind the herbarium, Iturriaga guides students in processing, identifying, and packaging the specimens to be inserted into the herbarium collections. “So they relate to the whole process—making a collection, and how difficult it is, and how important,” she said.
Iturriaga greatly appreciates the small, close community between the volunteers, students, and researchers at CUP. “I like the fact that we have become like one group,” she said. “We all get together and discuss many important things, not only about herbarium specimens—but of course most of the things are about this.”
Many of the students that Iturriaga works with go on to continue mycology research, pursue graduate studies in the field, or work in herbariums, applying the techniques they learned at CUP. For Finn Horn ‘25, an undergraduate herbarium assistant at CUP, discovering a passion for mycology was certainly unexpected. After transferring to Cornell as a junior to pursue philosophy, Horn became interested in biology, which turned into a double major.
“We got a lot of rain in California this one summer, so there were fungi growing everywhere,” Horn said. “It occurred to me that maybe somebody made an app for identifying fungi. I looked on the app store, found one, then just started taking pictures of mushrooms on walks, and eventually ended up here.”
Bob Dirig, CUP’s honorary curator of lichens, has been affiliated with CUP since 1977. He served as the curator of CUP from 2008 to 2010, after which he continued to work closely with the herbarium, pursuing his passion for lichens. As part of the lichen project, he is currently working on creating a list of all of the approximately one hundred lichens located in the pine barrens of the Albany Pine Bush Preserve.
Dirig was also instrumental in helping CUP transition to its current facility on Game Farm Rd in the early 2000s. The current building was converted from an old poultry barn to a modern herbarium space. Prior to that, the herbarium was located in an old transmission factory space on South Hill in Ithaca.
For Dirig, it was the visual beauty of fungi that drew him to mycology, and lichens in particular. As a child, he was fascinated by colorful butterflies and beetles, and a large lichen specimen found on his great-grandfather’s farm captured his attention for weeks.
In his undergraduate years at Cornell studying entomology and environmental education, Dirig discovered his passion for lichens during a Natural History class where the professor led students on a walk across the Cornell campus, identifying lichens and collecting specimens to perform tests. Over his time at CUP, Dirig has drawn many detailed illustrations of fungi from the herbarium’s collections.
Iturriaga encourages any student who is interested in mycology to reach out to her and take a tour of the herbarium’s collections, become a volunteer, or apply for a role as a herbarium assistant.
“There's still a lot to discover, it's a wonderful area to be,” Iturriaga said, referring to work in mycology and herbaria. “There's so much to be done. There's a whole lane of things for you to start.”
Tania Hao can be reached at th696@cornell.edu.
