Heather Dawson
To start with, could you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about the research that you’re doing?
My name is Heather Dawson. I am a student at the University of Oregon in Eugene. I started this spring term as a master’s student and I’ve now transitioned to the Ph.D. program, so I’ll start as a Ph.D. student in the fall.
My big interest is fungi, but I’m particularly interested in truffle fungi, which means basically any kind of mushroom that develops its fruiting body underground. The reason I’m interested in truffle fungi is I have a dog that can find them for me. Otherwise, they can be very challenging to find.
I’m going to be researching truffles in oak savannah habitat, which is a really understudied habitat for fungi in general, so there’s a lot to be discovered there.
I’m curious how you got into doing fieldwork. Were you always a really outdoorsy person, even as a kid?
When I was in fifth grade, my parents took my sister and I out of regular school and we started homeschooling. Our homeschooling experience was pretty much “do whatever you want”. It’s sometimes called “unschooling”. So a lot of our learning was just going to the library and bringing home enormous piles of books. We did a lot of reading.
But along with that came the freedom to be outside. Growing up, we had smaller natural spaces in Washington and then we moved to Massachusetts, where we had conservation land right behind our house with lots of trails. So my sister and I grew up just being outside.
I think that was really instrumental in getting me to where I am today. I was largely self-taught by that experience of getting my hands dirty, looking at bugs and mushrooms and plants and having a good time outside. I think that gave me a natural interest in fieldwork.
How did you get into studying fungi in particular?
When I was 11 or so, my parents gave me the National Audubon Guide to Mushrooms and I just fell in love with the pictures. We lived in a very dry climate at the time, but we would drive over occasionally to Seattle, where it was wet, and I would make my mom pull over in the forest so I could look for mushrooms.
Then I decided later on that I was going to be a dog trainer. I loved training dogs. That was going to be my trajectory. But when I started at community college, I took a fantastic biology series, which really sparked my interest in research. I had my first dog at the time and I started to train her to find culinary truffles.
She found a couple non-culinary species and that really sparked my interest in what else could be out there, because when I started looking for truffles, I thought, oh, you know, there’s just a couple of these species that people eat. But it turns out there’s hundreds of undescribed species because they’re just so hard to find. So the combination of being successful at what I wanted to find and also learning that there’s so much out there left to discover really developed my passion.
Also, there was the fact that it’s basically a treasure hunt. You go out in the woods and your dog companion finds underground treasures for you. It’s a really special experience. There’s always something new and exciting to find.
How did you transition from that into doing fieldwork more formally?
I graduated in 2020 with my bachelor’s degree. COVID had just started, so my last few classes were online, which wasn’t super inspiring. I desperately wanted to find a job doing something outside. I didn’t really find anything. It was really hard to find jobs at that point. Also, there were a lot of other people with a similar degree to what I had competing for those jobs.
I kept working at my retail job until spring of 2022. A project that was led by Bitty Roy at the University of Oregon was looking for a research technician and I had already made some connections there. They hired me as the research technician for this really big, national project looking at fungi all over North America. So I was going to be processing the samples, but there was also a lot of fieldwork involved. We’d go out and collect soil samples, do spore traps, collect mushrooms as well. That was my first formal introduction.
When you’re studying mushrooms, what specific questions are you trying to answer about them?
The big one is, of course, what are they doing? And to figure out what they’re doing, we first have to know who they are. Plants, insects, and animals—we have a pretty established idea of who they are. It’s pretty hard these days to go out and find a new species of plant. But it’s really, really easy to go out and find a new species of mushroom. They’re all over the place.
Right now, simply collecting and DNA sequencing all the stuff we collect is going to be instrumental in figuring out who is there. That means putting names on things, describing them, and then getting a sense of their distribution. Along with that, we can start figuring out what they’re doing. Fungi do a bunch of different things. They’re pathogens on plants, animals, and insects. They’re saprotrophs, so they do a lot of decomposition of organic material. Most of the ones I’m studying are mycorrhizals, so they’re in association with plants, mostly trees.
It sounds like you’ve got two things going. You’ve got the field component of your work and you also do genetic analysis. Could you talk us through a typical day of work, both in the field and back in the lab?
If I’m doing fieldwork, I go out pretty much any time of day as long as it’s not super hot. Working with a dog means I have to consider the temperature. My dog can do anything under 60 degrees. Above that, he starts having a hard time finding stuff.
Basically, I just let my dog go. He does a kind of circling to catch the scent. When he’s found a spot, he marks it by tail-wagging and then digging up the truffle. He’ll actually point it out with his nose, because a lot of the truffles that he finds are minuscule and soil-colored, so I can’t actually see them until he points them out. When he finds a truffle, I collect it if it’s interesting. If it’s not interesting, I put it back.
As far as the lab work goes, I’ll bring my truffle finds home and take a tiny bit of fresh material from each specimen and put it in extraction buffer. That can just sit in the freezer until I’m ready to do my DNA extractions. The rest of the material gets dried to be added to an herbarium—anyone can use that for research later down the line, but the DNA extractions work best on fresh material. Once I have a few hundred specimens, I can do the DNA extraction and sequencing, which is a week or so of being in the lab. I really enjoy the lab work. It’s satisfying.
Once I have my finalized set of samples, I send it to the sequencing folks. We have a genomics core here at U of O (University of Oregon). For the sequencing I’m doing, it takes a month to get it back. So there’s definitely of waiting involved.
What do you do with the genetic results once you have the sequencing data?
Once we have the data, there’s a national database called GenBank, which is a publicly available database for DNA sequences. We basically stick our sequence in there and see what it’s closest to. It’s not perfect because not everything has been sequenced. So there’s a lot of species that have been described and are sitting in herbaria somewhere, but they haven’t necessarily been sequenced. Another side project of mine is sequencing a lot of herbaria specimens and hopefully building that database up a little bit. Especially the truffles are very under-sequenced.
Did you train your dog yourself?
I did, with the help of my previous dog. With my first dog, it took me a while to be successful because when I took her out to a section of the forest, I didn’t know if there were truffles there. So I would ask her to look for them, but if there was nothing there, she couldn’t be successful and that would bring down her interest in looking. So it took a couple of years.
I trained my second dog on the fresh truffles that she found, which was great. He trained up really quickly. I’m training a third one as well with the same method.
I’m lucky. I feel like for anyone who gets into a field, the biggest struggle is finding something that makes you stand out. It’s really easy to be interested in something. It’s not as easy to explain to the world, your professors, your advisors, why you specifically should be doing it long-term. And for me, it’s really easy because finding truffles is hard and I have this magical method of doing it. I feel really blessed to have figured out a path that sets me apart from other people and has fast-tracked me to a position of being recognized for what I do.
My next question was going to be if there’s anything that’s specifically helped you on your journey, but I guess you’ve answered that!
Yeah! I don’t know what I would be doing today without my dog. You can find truffles without a dog. That’s basically how it’s been done, in North America at least, for the past hundred-ish years. You have a little rake and you look for little holes in the soil, because truffles attract rodents, so you look specifically not for tunnelling holes, but digging holes. You rake around those holes and if you’re lucky, you may find truffles that either aren’t ripe yet or that the rodents decided they didn’t want. You can also look for hotspots. Truffles like rotting logs and damp woody areas.
So you can certainly develop an eye for it. But the dog is a total cheat. It’s pretty neat. I really enjoy taking out truffle-raking experts with my dog—they’re all super, super impressed.
Have you had any negative experiences doing fieldwork?
Certainly going out by yourself in the woods can be scary. A lot of the good stuff to be found is in private land off of logging roads. I do try to bring another person with me for safety, but even then, yeah, it can be a little scary. I think the worst experience I’ve had was being chased off public land. It was Bureau of Land Management land, but you had to drive through private property to get there and someone had it in their head that nobody was allowed to drive that road because it was their property. That’s definitely a little scary—when someone comes up in their truck with their barking dog and is threatening: “I’m gonna prosecute you if you come back!”
When I’m out in the woods, I’m extra cautious. Every time a car goes by, I try not to be visible, because you never know who it’s going to be. I would say that’s definitely one thing that keeps me from checking out a lot of places I would like to. Wildlife-wise, Oregon is a safe place to be. The ticks are a drag. They’re worst part. But overall, I really love what I get to do. It’s a lot of fun.
How important has mentorship been in getting to where you are now?
So important! My advisor, Bitty Roy—without her, I definitely wouldn’t be doing this. There was definitely a hurdle when I started this job. I started as maybe a slightly underqualified candidate. I just had my bachelor’s degree. I didn’t have a ton of experience. But my advisor has been incredibly helpful, encouraging me to push a little bit harder to try and find the answers.
What advice would you give other people, especially girls and women, who are interested in getting into science or into fieldwork?
I think sometimes it’s a real challenge being comfortable outside if you haven’t done a lot of outdoors work before. Simply figuring out what gear and equipment you need can make the difference between someone who decides they love fieldwork and someone who decides they never want to do it again.
If you’re not prepared, asking someone what you need for the specific fieldwork you’re getting into is going to be important. Especially in Oregon, where we are, you can have anything from cold, freezing weather where it feels like your fingers are going to fall off to incredibly hot, so you think you’re going to get heatstroke if you stay out any longer. There’s a lot of things you can do to prepare yourself for that, whether it’s an extra set of gloves, bringing waterproof shoes or rain pants—rain pants were a life-changer for me out here.
You often don’t need top-of-the-line stuff. I know cost can be really prohibitive. Go to used stores, go to secondhand stores. A lot of my gear is affordable secondhand.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I think connecting with like-minded people is important. When I first got into lab work, it was because a professor said: “You really need to get lab experience because I think you’re the kind of person that would like it. Why don’t you look at the list of labs that the University of Oregon has and reach out to some of them and see if they’re looking for undergrads?” And I did that and I found some really fantastic people.
If that’s available to you, I think that is incredibly helpful. People who are interested in the same things you are will provide you with opportunities to learn and grow and feel welcome. Obviously, we’re all interested in the science, but it’s not only about science. It’s also surrounding yourself with people who help you and make you grow into the best person you can be.
