Rate My Professor Karen Hughes

Karen Hughes is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a Professor of Mycology in Biology. She earned her MS and PhD in Genetics, with a minor in statistics, from the University of Utah. Hughes joined the University of Tennessee in 1973 and served as Head of the Botany Department from 1985 to 1991, before it became part of EEB. Her academic interests center on fungal phylogeny, DNA barcoding, mushroom evolution, species delimitation, and hybridization in agaric fungi. Since the mid-1980s, she has researched basidiomycete fungi, focusing on speciation processes, distributions, and biogeography. More recently, her work has emphasized post-fire fungi, including pyrophilous species fruiting after wildfires, as well as post-fire mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi. In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, she examines factors driving high fungal diversity, partitioning of diversity, heterozygosity rates and limits, changes in biodiversity over 50 years, and impacts of climate change. She employs DNA sequence-based phylogenies to investigate whether agaric species have global distributions or are partitioned geographically, barriers to gene flow via airborne spores, and whether patterns arise from vicariance events or Quaternary migrations.

Hughes has produced over 140 peer-reviewed publications, including landmark papers such as “Nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region as a universal DNA barcode marker for Fungi” (2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), “Reconstructing the early evolution of Fungi using a six-gene phylogeny” (2006, Nature), “Major clades of Agaricales: a multilocus phylogenetic overview” (2006, Mycologia), “Contributions of rpb2 and tef1 to the phylogeny of mushrooms and allies” (2007, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution), and “Megaphylogeny resolves global patterns of mushroom evolution” (2019, Nature Ecology & Evolution). As Co-PI on NSF and NBII grants, she led efforts to digitize the University of Tennessee Fungal Herbarium, comprising over 60,000 specimens, and conducted fieldwork for the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory in the Smokies in conjunction with the 2004 MSA meeting. Her contributions earned her Fellow status in the Mycological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hughes served the MSA as Council member (2002–2003), chair of the Development Committee (2006–2013), and chair of the Education Committee (2015–2019). The University of Tennessee Fungal Collection in the EEB department was dedicated in her honor.