Rodrigo Olarte

Rodrigo Olarte's contributions to this project came as a doctoral student in the department of Plant Pathology at NCSU. Rodrigo was born in the Philippines, but grew up near the San Francisco Bay Area. He received a B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis in Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, and later completed a Masters in Plant Pathology at Cornell University in upstate New York. While at NCSU in hte lab of Dr. Ignazio Carbone, he studied the ramifications of sex in regard to toxin heritability in experimental crosses of the fungus Aspergillus flavus, with the long-term goal of finding more effective ways of controlling this fungus in nature. Rodrigo comleted his Ph.D. in 2014.