I am a mycologist specialised in the taxonomy of Aspergillus, Penicillium, Talaromyces and other moulds from the natural and built environment. My research focus includes their biodiversity, ecology, phylogenetics, nomenclature and identification with a particular interest in taxonomically robust ecological and biodiversity studies. My major contribution to the international mycological community has been the accepted species lists for Aspergillus, Penicillium and Talaromyces that was published in Samson et al (2014), Visagie et al (2014) and Yilmaz et al (2014). Before these papers, describing new species in these genera was very complicated because of unavailable reference data. Since publishing these accepted species lists and associated DNA sequence reference data, Aspergillus grew from 339 to 450 species, Penicillium from 354 to 483 species, and Talaromyces from 88 to 171 species. These papers had a big international impact and have been cited a combined 1035 times (on 2020/01). An update to these papers was recently published in Houbraken et al (2020).

My research has now shifted to exploit the strong and modern taxonomy we created for our genera of interest. To do this, we have several grain-related projects that are focused on characterising fungal communities related to these important crops and developing methods to more efficiently monitor communities and rapidly detect species of interest. During this process, we are also expanding the already large culture collection housed at FABI to now include reference strains of grain associated fungi to be used for a variety of research projects. One of these is to sequence the genomes of especially mycotoxigenic fungi that will lead to a better understanding of their mycotoxin producing capabilities.