On the night of the new moon, Dennis Desjardin and a crew of scientists and graduate students trekked through cobra and leech infested rainforests for miles. Once they finally stopped, they turned off their headlamps, plunging into total darkness. The crew searched in blind anticipation for someone to spot the glowing mushroom.

“For me, mushrooms are where it’s at,” said Desjardin, one of SF State’s mycology professors and research scientists.

Desjardin, 57, has been chased by vipers, endured the flesh rotting bite of a necrotic spider, and has been confronted by uzi-clad Colombian drug traffickers. But what has driven his almost mythical quest is what he considers a charismatic kind of fungus.

“A mushroom is a fungus but not all fungi are mushrooms,” he said as he sat in his office backed by a computer flashing pictures of colorful oversized shrooms.

Desjardin’s appreciation for mushrooms grew from the soil of family tradition.
His maternal grandparents emigrated from Switzerland in 1920 to a small farm in Northern Calif. Desjardin said that it is Swiss custom to forage for mushrooms and bring them home to the kitchen table. He grew up searching for the edible fungus, and has never stopped.

A project taking him to southern Brazil for weeks at a time has resulted in the discovery of six new species of bioluminescent mushrooms, which glow in the dark. Once someone spots the luminous shroom during their search, Desjardin’s group of about eight other scientists go back to their hotel rooms to study the new specimen. They take photographs and drink sugarcane liquor through the night. “You’ve gotta have something to do,” said Desjardin, who laughed about the drinking. “It’s midnight and we’ve still got fungi to look at.”

Much of his travels are funded by grant money he has received for his research accomplishments in the evolution and ecology of mushrooms. He was honored at SF State’s 2007 Open Faculty Meeting last month and given the Distinguished Faculty Award for Excellence in Research. SF State professor of biology, Dr. Robert Patterson nominated Desjardin for the award. In Patterson’s nomination letter he noted that Desjardin has discovered and published over 150 species and three new genera of mushrooms. He has received over $2 million from the National Science Foundation to help fund his research and student training.

“He is a very strict scientist,” Rulin Zhao, a Chinese student trainee of Desjardin said, briefly turning away from the fungus she was examining underneath a microscope set up in SF State’s Henry D. Thiers Herbarium. The herbarium holds the largest collection of fungi west of the Mississippi River.

Desjardin who is the director of the herbarium studied under the late Thiers at SF State from 1981 to 1985. “He was my guru. I was his disciple,” Desjardin said. After studying with Thiers, Desjardin got his Ph.D. from University of Tennessee and came back to teach at SF State in 1990. “I basically came home,” he said.

When he is not trekking through Brazil he is enlightening his mycology students on the wonderful world of mushrooms starting by answering the two most common questions: “Can I eat it?” and “Will I get high?”

Erich Schickenberg, who said he is fascinated by mushrooms of the non-hallucinogetic kind, takes Desjardin’s mushroom taxonomy course. The botany major said that he is happy to work with Desjardin, who he believes to be one of the top mycologists in the world.

“He’s knows his stuff,” said Schickenberg.