Speaker: Dr. Adriana Romero-Olivares, PhD., Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University. She is a soil microbiologist who works at the intersection of ecosystem ecology and evolution with an emphasis on fungi. She did her bachelor’s degree in Biology and master’s degree in Molecular Ecology at the Autonomous University of Baja California. Dr. Romero-Olivares completed her PhD in the University of California Irvine, where she investigated the effects of global warming on the soil fungal communities of boreal forests in Alaska and consequences for decomposition and the carbon cycle. As a postdoctoral scholar in the University of New Hampshire, she studied fungal communities in temperate forests in New England experiencing long-term simulated warming and nitrogen pollution and impacts to the cycling of carbon