While most mushroom hunters, enthusiasts and biologists often scour the spongy forest floor for fungi, University of Oregon biologist and emeritus professor George Carroll has always looked to the trees.

Throughout his nearly 50-year career, Carroll has been intensely interested in endophytic fungi found on living needles and conifer twigs. In the late 1970s, when Carroll began his groundbreaking research and while the rest of the mycological community was studying endophytes in grasses, his work set the standard in his area of interest.

Carroll’s exceptional career — which began in 1967 as an assistant professor at the UO — is now being recognized by the Mycological Society of America, which is presenting him with the Distinguished Mycologist Award.

The award is one of the highest honors bestowed by the society. It acknowledges the quantity, originality and quality of published research as well as the degree of service made to the society and the mycological community in general.

Carroll’s work “predated the explosion of endophyte literature by a decade or more,” according to the society, and has been cited nearly one thousand times by scholars and experts around the world.

While he remained a loyal Duck throughout his career, Carroll served as a visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, at Kyoto University in Japan and at the University of the Free State in South Africa.

“George Carroll has had a great impact on the field of mycology through his research, service and teaching and is highly deserving of this Distinguished Mycologist Award,” the society’s announcement reads.

— By Nathaniel Brown, Public Affairs Communications