Today on Mushroom Hour we have the distinct pleasure of being joined by Professor Tadashi Fukami – head of Stanford University’s Fukami Lab. Professor Fukami is an expert on community ecology and along with supporting his students and lab members, his primary interest is to understand historical contingency in community assembly. He is broadly interested in how species interact with one another in ecosystems and enjoys working with other lab members on the variety of projects that they bring to the lab. He earned his PhD at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with Jim Drake and Dan Simberloff. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research in New Zealand and Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa before joining the Stanford faculty in 2008. He sheds light on how communities assemble, even at microbe-sized ecologies, and has revealed amazing insights about fungal ecologies and interactions with other organisms that many of us have never even heard of.    TOPICS COVERED:    Embracing Nature Outside Tokyo   Coming to America   Fundamentals of Community Assembly   Historical Contingency in Community Assembly   Isolating Ecological Islands   Microbial Community Ecology   Rules of Community Assembly?   Understanding Community Assembly in Restoring Ecosystems   Flowers, Fallen Logs and the Human Body as Ecological Communities   Yeast Fungi Living in Flower Nectar   Monkeyflower Nectar Biome   Plant Pollinator Mutualistic Interactions   Applied Agricultural Uses of Understanding Nectar Microbiome   Metacommunities   EPISODE RESOURCES:     Prof Tadashi Fukami Staff Page: https://profiles.stanford.edu/tadashi-fukami    Fukami Lab Website: https://web.stanford.edu/~fukamit/   Prof. Tad Fukami Research: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tadashi-Fukami    Prof. James Drake Research: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/James-A-Drake-2044716847