Alumni Profile: Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Ph.D. ’20

Alumni Profile

Alumni Profile: Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Ph.D. ’20

The Evolution of a Mycology Taxonomist:
Finding Kindred Spirits in Disparaged Places

Judy Gelman Myers, Contributing Writer

Patricia Kaishian was instinctively drawn to nature as a child. Fortunately, her parents encouraged her and her siblings to roam in the woods outside their home, where Kaishian unintentionally began to initiate lifelong relationships with the species around her.

Her first love in the animal world was snakes and other reptiles. “I felt an innate kinship with them,” she said. While she avidly explored their habits and biology, there was an emotional component to her youthful affinity for them, too. Kaishian ventured ever deeper into the safe, unpeopled world of forests and swamps. They became a haven where she would discover species of great diversity and form. “All these different ways of ‘being’ let me see and understand myself in a way that felt comfortable and made me feel like I belonged,” she said.

When it came time to apply for college, Kaishian wanted to study biology, but medicine was the only path she knew. She couldn’t seem to find her way forward. She fell into crisis mode, and her parents insisted that she take the semester off to come home.

What could have been a disaster became a boon. To fill her time, Kaishian took a four-day workshop at Cornell, where she met her first mycologist. She couldn’t get over how fascinating — and badly understood — mushrooms were. “I was blown away by that strange juxtaposition that mushrooms could be so vital and beautiful but still generate this negative cultural perception,” she said. They reminded her of the snakes and snapping turtles she’d found so magical in her youth, but others despised.

After the workshop, Kaishian found herself completely captivated by mushrooms and began seeking out every opportunity to learn and explore. She returned to Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and for the next few years, she guided her own undergraduate mycological education.

 

 

 

Through a tropical biology class, she spent a week at a Costa Rican research station. It was there that she made a discovery that set her on the path to becoming a taxonomist. “You could find books upon books about plants and animals, but there were virtually no resources about the amazing mushroom diversity at the research station. I was shocked,” she said. When she realized that the vast majority of fungal species hadn’t even been documented, she resolved to find an advisor under whom she could conduct basic taxonomic research. However, the thought of applying to graduate school was daunting. When she told her parents she wanted to get a Ph.D., her father recommended ESF. Almost since its founding, there had been some sort of fungal element to the research at ESF, so Kaishian immediately applied.

At ESF, Kaishian felt like a kid in a candy shop. For the first time, she was surrounded by people who loved the natural world as she did. With so many exciting classes being offered, she hardly knew where to begin. One of the most formative was Philosophy of Science, where students were called upon to consider what science is, how it is influenced by social forces, and how to draw the line between what is cultural and what is objective fact.

Kaishian found the questions particularly relevant to fungi. “Mycology is an interesting case study in how social and political forces affect what we materially know about the world,” she said. She believes that mushrooms were largely undocumented historically because people were dismissive or fearful of them, categorizing them largely as pathogens or poisonous. She argues that this unscientific worldview limited science in two ways: by shaping which research questions were considered valid and by ignoring the “life giving, generative things that fungi do, such as forming mycorrhizal relationships, living symbiotically within the tissues of plants, making them more dynamic and robust and healthy,” as she put it.

In 2023, Kaishian became curator of mycology at the New York State Museum. At ESF, she had become familiar with the museum’s massive collection of mushrooms, assembled by North America’s preeminent mycologist in the mid-1800s, Charles Peck, who also founded the museum.

 

 

As curator, Kaishian conducts her own research, including a long-term, intensive study of a forest in Rensselaer County. Such  studies in mycology are uncommon but crucial to generating a thorough understanding of a site’s fungal diversity. “Fungi are ephemeral and often unpredictable, so you need to do long-term inventories because you’re not going to see all the species in
one given year,” she said. In addition, she’s participating in a shorter-term survey with other state biologists at Minnewaska State Park to produce a multi-kingdom survey.

She’s also turned her attention to unknown mycologists. In the late 19th century, Mary Banning dedicated her life to documenting the fungi of Maryland. “A technically-skilled scientist, incredible watercolor illustrator, and amazing writer,” said Kaishian, Banning produced a massive manuscript but found no takers. She slipped into poverty and homelessness and mailed the manuscript to Peck for safekeeping. Peck stuffed it in a drawer. Eighty years later, Kaishian’s predecessor at the museum uncovered the manuscript, curated an exhibit of Banning’s work, and secured her induction into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame. Despite this trajectory, he wasn’t able to get the manuscript published, so when Kaishian started the job, she curated another exhibit of Banning’s work, wrote a foreword to the manuscript, and submitted it to Princeton University Press. Thanks to Kaishian, Banning’s lifework will be published in late 2027.

In 2025, Kaishian published a book of her own, FOREST EUPHORIA: the abounding queerness of nature. It became a national bestseller, selected title of the National Book Foundation in Science and Literature, a Vanity Fair Best Book of 2025, a Time Magazine 100 Must-read Book of 2025, and a work described by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer ’75 as “an antidote to the loneliness of our species.” Part memoir, part science, it invites the reader into the magical world of unloved species that Kaishian came to cherish as a child.

Forest Euphoria subtly draws biology lessons from the emerging field of queer ecology. She points out that in the nonhuman world, sex is not divided into two and only two categories. “Some organisms have multiple sexes in one body, and some fungi
have thousands of different potential mating types.”

Kaishian seeks to dispel the charge that queerness is unnatural through scientific explorations of nonbinary beings and behavior in the natural world. “One of the goals of my book, and one of the goals of queer ecology, is just simply to explore how natural
these things actually are, and that a charge of being unnatural is simply unscientific,” she said.

The book also engages queer theory to examine how power moves in culture. What is considered normal? What is deviant? Who gets to define those terms? What are the consequences of existing outside what is considered normal? Once again, Kaishian points
to her beloved mushrooms. “Why do people fear mushrooms? What is it about these life forms that has generated such disgust, and how has that rendered the field marginal?”

Here is where she sees in fungi the positive lessons of queerness. “Fungi demonstrate powerful, beautiful concepts like interspecies bonds, decay as a way of bringing new life, sharing resources through mycelial networks. Queerness is about community, about collectivism. It’s about understanding your obligation to one another so that all can survive.”

 

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