Team

Luisa Zamora Chavez (she/they)

Luisa is a Master's student at Arizona State University in Nate Upham's lab investigating how two aspects of wildlife biology influence rodent lung fungal communities: (1) phylogenetic relatedness of rodent host populations; and (2) habitat similarity over adjacent elevational biomes. She is determining these dynamics in rodents found in one of the Madrean Sky Islands, a set of highly biodiverse and isolated mountain ranges spanning the s southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. Luisa's Master's thesis seeks to not only determine how the composition of  wild rodent lung mycobiomes varies with host phylogeny and habitat, but also understand the dynamics of host reservoir co-evolution with certain fungal taxa, such as Coccidioides (the causative agent of Valley Fever).