Featured Speakers
Gary Lincoff
Gary Lincoff is the author of the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, Toxic and Hallucinogenic Mushroom Poisoning: a Handbook for Physicians and Mushroom Hunters, The Mushroom Book, and editor of Wild Mushrooms of Telluride, Simon & Schuster's Guide to Mushrooms, and the Eyewitness Handbook: Mushrooms.
Gary is a Past President of NAMA, co-leader of Fungophile, co-founder of the Telluride Mushroom Festival, instructor at the New York Botanical Garden and has the annual Gary Lincoff Mushroom Foray in Pittsburgh named in honor of him.
Elio Schaechter
Dr. Elio Schaechter is an old mushrooms aficionado. He served for 20 years as the editor of the Bulletin of the Boston Mycological Club and in 1996 helped found the San Diego Mycological Society. In Boston, over many years, Elio taught courses on mushroom field identification and the use of the microscope. In his other life, he is a microbiologist who spent most of his career at Tufts University Medical School. There, he chaired the department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology for 23 years before retiring to San Diego in 1995. He has authored and edited over a half dozen microbiology textbooks and technical books.
Elio received the Awards for Contributions to Amateur Mycology from the Northeast Mycological Foray in the 1991 and from the North American Mycological Association in 1993. In 1997, he published In the Company of Mushrooms: a Biologist's Tale (Harvard University Press), a book about "what are mushrooms and their relationship to people in various cultures and ages."
This is Elio's fourth visit to SOMA. He spoke at the monthly meeting in April, 2002 and was the featured speaker at SOMA Camp 2001 and 2004.