Profile for Todd Osmundson
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Todd Osmundson
Pronouns: He/His
Professor
Biology
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Todd Osmundson Pronouns: He/His
Professor
Biology
Specialty area(s)
Mycology (Fungal Biology), Biodiversity & conservation, Biogeography, Bioinformatics, DNA barcoding, Metagenomics, Phylogenetics, Population genetics, and Systematics. Please contact me if you have any interest in undergraduate or graduate (MS) research in these topics.
Brief biography
I am a fungal biologist interested in fungi in nature (especially mushrooms) and medically-relevant fungi. I use several kinds of genetic data, including genomics, transcriptomics, and DNA barcoding, to study the biology of these organisms. I have had the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in Australia, China, Costa Rica, French Polynesia, Guatemala, Mexico, Svalbard, Thailand, Canada, and the United States, in tropical, temperate, arctic, and alpine biomes. I am also very interested in bioinformatics and computational biology, especially the analysis of high-throughput ("next-gen") sequence data for genomics, population genetics, biodiversity research, microbiome diversity, and transcriptomics (gene expression studies); these interests have provided me with the opportunity to collaborate with researchers at UWL and elsewhere on organisms including insects, fish, soil microbes, aquatic microbes, and mollusks.
Some of the areas of current research in my lab include understanding the invasion history of the cultivated golden oyster mushroom (Pleurotus citrinopileatus), species discovery and phylogenetics in the bolete genus Tylopilus, understanding the biology of post-fire morel mushrooms (genus Morchella), characterizing Driftless area fungal biodiversity, and studies of alpine fungi.
Current courses at UWL
- Organismal Biology (BIO 203)
- Genetics (BIO 306) Lecture & Lab
- Senior Capstone Seminar (BIO 491)
Education
- Postdoctoral researcher, Dept. of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, University of California, Berkeley
- Ph.D., Department of Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology, Columbia University
Advanced certificate in Environmental Policy, Columbia University - M.S., Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology, Montana State University
- B.A., Biology, University of Montana
- B.A., Geology, Carleton College
Career
Teaching history
- First-year Seminar (FYS 100): "Interpreting Life’s Instruction Book: What Genomes Tell Us About Ourselves, Our Pathogens, and Our World"
- General Biology (BIO 105)
- Organismal Biology (BIO 203)
- Special Topics in Biology: Environmental challenges and solutions in Southeast Asia from the French colonial period to the present (BIO 260: Off-campus study program in Viet Nam and Laos, to be offered Summer, 2026)
- Genetics (BIO 306)
- Mycology (BIO 412/512)
- Medical Mycology (BIO 413/513)
- Evolution (BIO 429/529)
- Bioinformatics (BIO 440/540)
- Plant-Microbe Interactions (BIO 442/542)
- Seminar in Biology - Genome Data Analysis (BIO 460)
- Senior Capstone Seminar (BIO 491)
- Graduate seminar: Biological Sequence Analysis (BIO 721)
- 21st-Century Mycology (BIO 723)
- Mycology reading group
Research and publishing
Kudos
published
published
published
published