Monika S. Fischer
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mofisch.bsky.social
Monika S. Fischer
@mofisch.bsky.social
960 followers 630 following 97 posts
Fungi. Fire. Genetics. Ecology. (she/her)
🍄🔥Assistant Prof at UBC Vancouver: @ubcbotany.bsky.social and @forestry.ubc.ca
📍grateful guest on the Salish Coast

Lab Website: fischerlab.botany.ubc.ca
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mofisch.bsky.social
Teaching prep for fall motivated me to revisit the awesome Oral History For Mycology project on YouTube. So many great stories, but shout out to @benwolfe.bsky.social for highlighting this incredible Bray-Curtis ordination from 1969 by Martha Christensen. So cool. So glad we have computers now 😅
Photo of a square wood board with several wood dowels rising up out of the board at various heights and positions
July 16, 2025 at 3:37 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
Inaugural Fischer Fire Fungi Lab field trip was a huge success! We collected so many familiar faces (Pyronema, Geopyxis, Tricharina, etc.), learned a bunch about pyrophilous insects, and fell in love with the monsoon-moistened sagebrush/pine forests on the doorstep of BC’s desert landscape. ❤️‍🔥🍄‍🟫
Six happy mycologists standing in a line showing off their favorite finds of the day. In the background is a dry, mostly brown, recently burned forest. A tacklebox full of mostlt mushroom treasures, plus a few liverworts, a lichen, and some yellow flowers
May 9, 2025 at 4:52 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
I’m so incredibly proud of Hemi Patel for presenting her Master’s thesis today, and humbled that she chose me to serve on her committee. She cultivated, in rigorous detail, a feasible method for rethinking the way we build, inhabit, and think about architecture using mycomaterials! 🍄
A femme South-Asian (Gujarati) grad student wearing a tan touque sits in front of a laptop and a small audience gathered in black plastic chairs. A projector screen displays the text, “The Roots We Are - Exploring Our Material Entanglement”. Behind the student is an aesthetic arrangement of several sheets of paper containing images and text, below which are 3D examples of mycomaterials in various stages of production. A collection of zines entitled “Animals”, “Fungi”, “Shrubs”, “Trees”, and “Herbs”. Which complimented the narrative of entangled ecosystem architecture
April 26, 2025 at 2:19 AM
mofisch.bsky.social
What a fun way to get a glimpse of my lab! Huge thanks to Conlan, Nicole, Siddharth, and Jag for choosing to interview me about cell-cell communication and Neurospora for their SCIE300 class project! @science.ubc.ca

read & watch here: medium.com/@leotard.tri...
April 16, 2025 at 6:48 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
Huge News! It’s official - my lab has been awarded the NSERC Discovery Grant! Funding 5 years of fabulous fire fungi research! ✨🔥🍄🧫🔬🧬🍁

Huge thanks to @science.ubc.ca and @ubcbotany.bsky.social for supporting me through this big milestone! 🤓 #NewPI
Urn-shaped brown mushrooms fruiting amid a landscape of charcoal and pine needles. Photo taken last weekend near Cache Creek, BC
April 10, 2025 at 4:00 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
Most days setting up a new lab feel a bit like xmas, but today REALLY felt like xmas! If you hunt mushrooms in Cascadia - you need this book!! 🍄 Mushrooms of Cascadia 🍄‍🟫 by the exceptional Schwarz & Siegel 🙌
Photo of a white bookshelf with 10 copies of the Mushrooms of Cascadia by Schwarz & Siegle, in addition to a smorgasbord of other books, most about fungi.
April 10, 2025 at 4:12 AM
mofisch.bsky.social
Walking through the set-up process for my new Agilent BioTek plate reader and the first time it extended it’s tray felt like a greeting, as if it was trying to say hello and shake my hand! Hello friend! Welcome! We’re going to do so much cool science together! 🤗
Photo of a beige box on a dark counter top - the box is the plate reader! A black rectangular tray extends out of the front of a box and a pale hand reaches toward it as if to shake hands
March 18, 2025 at 12:40 AM
mofisch.bsky.social
Great seminar today from @mcstitzer.bsky.social and I’m now officially obsessed with this perspective that a genome is an ecosystem - just like the biogeography of organisms, whats the geography (geneography?!) of genes across genome(s)?!
Image of an image being projected onto a screen, which says “the genome is an ecosystem” with an illustration of transposons jumping around the genome
March 14, 2025 at 1:27 AM
mofisch.bsky.social
Fabulous lichen seminar today from @spribille.bsky.social Lichens contain multitudes - a truly incredibly diversity of microbes that evolved a different solution to multicellularity besides the usual developmental programming. Metagenomics! Auxotrophy! Resource economics and microbial interactions!
A cross-section of a lichen thallus is projected onto a large screen in a wood-paneled meeting room, with a man standing to the right, dressed in dark colors, talking and gesticulating
March 11, 2025 at 10:53 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
Step 1: Spend the most money you’ve ever spent on any one thing (professionally or personally)

Step 2: become a cat

For real tho, I am AMPED for my labs new Agilent BioTek plate reader. Pretty sure it’s gonna be even more fun than the box it was shipped in, and it is a fun box.
A very happy lady wearing a pink scarf with her arms raised with glee as she sits comfortably inside a very large cardboard box
March 11, 2025 at 10:17 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
Just had a fantastic journal club discussion about this epic @nature.com paper from @tobykiers.bsky.social +team that extremely thoroughly details the network architecture of an AM fungus. We especially appreciated the color-coded mathematical variables :) ...but also>> 🧵 1/3
Computer screenshot of a Zoom window showing mathematical equations on the left, and people's faced in boxes on the right
March 7, 2025 at 1:17 AM
mofisch.bsky.social
I’d like to personally thank whoever invented image-to-text. I’ve been dreading transcribing all of these serial numbers, but then I realized I could just take a photo and copy&paste the serial numbers directly off the photo. 💫
Multiple stacks of many white boxes with text and barcodes.
March 6, 2025 at 1:17 AM
mofisch.bsky.social
3.9! Fun!
Earthquake map
March 3, 2025 at 6:21 AM
mofisch.bsky.social
Awesome seminar today from Juan Manuel Martinez who is visiting from CICESE - always such a feast of delightful Neurospora microscopy, and now we know there’s apical ER that snuggles with mitochondria! 🤯🤩
On the right side, a brown-haired Juan stands behind a podium and gazes pensively to the left. Behind him is a projector screen displaying the title slide of his presentation, slightly obscured by two long-haired audience members in the foreground. The presentation titled reads, “structure and function of the apical reticulum in the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa”
February 27, 2025 at 4:03 AM
mofisch.bsky.social
My weekend read

www.gutenberg.org/files/33346/...
Antiquated book cover for “How to tell the birds from the flowers” - below is an illustration of a crow and a crocus that look whimsically similar!
February 22, 2025 at 8:30 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
Happy #SuperbOwl Sunday!! …Behold! The adorable Burrowing Owl of North America
Photo of six brown and white speckled owls standing tall on their hilariously skinny legs
February 9, 2025 at 5:43 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
As everyone's sharing their Spotify Wrapped's, I'm reminded to update this running graph I started years ago documenting wildfires in California. Data publicly available from @calfire.bsky.social 🔥
grey bars = total land burned each year
red dots = individual mega-fires that burned >100,000acres
🧵👇
graph showing number of acres burned on the vertical axis, and years on the horizontal axis
December 9, 2024 at 11:22 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
Met the cousin of @karlthefog.bsky.social yesterday… #vancouver does the fog have a name?! (and a bsky account?!)
Dense fog at UBC with a fountain the foreground, and trees and people fading into the fog behind the fountain Screenshot of a news photo showing the aerial view of fog almost completely enveloping a major suspension bridge in Vancouver, BC. There is a ferry on the water!
December 5, 2024 at 6:27 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
The model filamentous fungus, Neurospora crassa! Black football-shaped ascospore germinating, growing, and ultimately producing asexual spores 🍄🤗 …a work in progress, color coming soon!
Photo of a back ink tattoo on a pale forearm
November 17, 2024 at 7:40 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
Speaking of social media debates. I’d like to end the debate on “what is a sandwich”
#sandwichdebate
All foods made up of at least 2 ingredients can be classified according to two axes: (1) un-structured [soups & salads] vs structured [sandwiches & pies], and (2) the ingredients assembled together into their final shape before [pies & soups] or after [sandwiches & salads] any cooking
November 14, 2024 at 4:39 PM
mofisch.bsky.social
Thrilled to announce that I will be joining UBC Botany and Forest Conservation Sciences as an Assistant Professor very soon! Stay tuned for updates from the Fischer Fire Fungi Lab, opening this fall in beautiful, fungiful, Vancouver, BC! 🔥🍄🔥
June 11, 2024 at 8:28 PM