A winding trail to science career

It all started in Crescent City.

Yet as late as the age of 30, Dennis Desjardin had absolutely no idea he’d become a professor and researcher in the field of mushroom science — mycology — nor that he would make valuable discoveries around the world.

In 1980, the Crescent City native was a Marin County construction foreman by day and aspiring San Francisco musician by night. Yet those aspirations were waning.

After graduating from Del Norte High School in 1968, Desjardin went to San Jose State University, where he majored in math and double-minored in music and Asian philosophy.

“And that was the problem,” he says. “The Asian philosophy and math and music took me in different directions. Much to Mom and Dad’s chagrin I dropped out of college the last semester of my senior year to play music.”

Eight years later, he felt he’d done all he wanted to do with rock ’n’ roll, jazz and carpentry and began to contemplate what he would do with his life if he returned to college.

“I started thinking about what I did, and I figured that I walked in the woods as well as anyone, so why can’t I get paid to do that? So I thought I would go in to do mushroom taxonomy or plant taxonomy,” Desjardin says.

Childhood interest pays off

Born and reared in Crescent City, Desjardin’s mushroom taxonomy skills date back to as far as he can remember, when he was about 3 years old. His grandparents, Louis and Maria Tosio, were Swiss immigrants who learned to identify and pick edible wild mushrooms in their native land.

“They’ve been here collecting and eating wild mushrooms, living off the land basically since 1920. Mom (Alice Desjardin) was born here in Crescent City and taken off to collect wild mushrooms with her mom and dad from when she was, like me, little, and then we all went together when my sister and I were born,” Desjardin says.

By the time he reached high school, he realized there were more edible varieties than the three his family knew — porcini, chanterelles and field mushrooms. But with no field guides readily available at the time, all Desjardin could do was wander the area and take notes on every variety he found. 

Having decided to return to college, Desjardin made inquiries at UC Berkeley and San Fransisco State University. He attended the Mycological Society of San Francisco’s November fungus fair, where he met Dr. Harry Thiers, an SFSU mycologist who taught many of the nation’s leading mycologists over a 30-year span.

Thiers’ practice at these fairs was to sit at a table, his graduate students seated on both sides of him like apostles, while a stream of different kinds of mushrooms and other fungi were presented to Thiers for identification. Thiers would challenge his graduate students to identify them first, then he would correct them if they were not up to the task. Into the room walked Desjardin, watching this exercise.

“Dr. Thiers just kind of looks at me and a mushroom comes by and he hands it off to the graduate students on either side and said, ‘Do you know what this is?’ And he handed it to me, whom he’d never seen before, and I said, ‘Well, that’s such and such.’ And he was suitably impressed and did that for three or four mushrooms that came by because I had studied on my own by that point because it was 1980 and I had read field guides.”

Whirlwind education

Thiers invited Desjardin to meet with him, and together they discussed the prospect of Desjardin returning to school to pursue a career in mycology.

“Dr. Thiers was like a second father to me. He was really amazing because we didn’t just talk about mycology. To sit you down when you first come in, and say, ‘Well I don’t want you to get into this now because you’re 30 years old. I want you to realize what this actually means. There’s not a lot of money in academia, so this is a big decision for you, and this is going to take you as many as 12 years to get a PhD and move on.’ He basically said, ‘You’re going to be about 40 by the time you get your PhD. Are you ready for that?’

“It was like, jeez, nobody ever asked me that before. And I said, ‘I’m ready for that.’ And it all paid off.”

Desjardin plowed through 64 units of undergraduate work in biology in two years. Studying under Thiers, he got his master’s degree in botany/mycology in two years, when normally it takes three to four at SFSU. And he completed his PhD at the University of Tennessee in four years when normally it takes five to seven, Desjardin says.

After teaching for just one year at Oberlin College in Ohio, he landed one of the plumbest jobs in the business — Dr. Thiers’ own position as a mycology professor at San Francisco State.

“Don’t tell Dennis this, but Dr. Thiers told me that Dennis was the best student he ever had,” says advanced amateur mycologist and Mykoweb.com co-founder Michael Wood, who also studied under Thiers. “Thiers pulled all the strings to make sure Dennis got the job.”

International research

Since he began working at SFSU in 1990, Desjardin has been as productive in his research as he was driven in his schooling.

Desjardin’s work has focused on the tropics, first in Hawaii, where he cataloged the major islands’ fungi in collaboration with colleagues based there. Due to the resemblance of the islands’ fungi to those of Southeast Asia, for many years he has subsequently done research in Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Micronesia and Thailand. In the process, he and a fellow mycologist from Hong Kong set up a mushroom research center in Thailand where Desjardin has supervised the doctoral work of several mycologists studying at Southeast Asian universities.

He has also done research in other parts of the world, including islands off the west coast of Africa, and recently Desjardin has made noteworthy discoveries of mushrooms in Brazil that are luminescent, glowing in the dark.

“Early on in my mycology career I made the decision that there are places in the world that I want to go, and I don’t really want to have to pay for it, so I’m going to design a research project around places in the world that need science done, and I’m going to see if I can get a grant to do it,” Desjardin says.

But he hasn’t forgotten his own back yard.

Desjardin, Wood and advanced amateur mycologist Dr. Fred Stevens, the other co-founder of Mykoweb.com, recently signed a contract with a Portland, Ore., publisher to produce an 800-page, full-color, comprehensive guidebook to the fungi of California, something Desjardin describes as “a crapload of work” that has been 25 years in the making.

“It’s amazing they want to publish an 800-page color book,” Desjardin says.

Amazing indeed, although at this point in Desjardin’s stellar career that shouldn’t even be a surprise.