Gates, Genevieve M. (née Piscioneri)   (1952 -  )

Born on 18 November 1952 in Pyramid Hill, Victoria, Australia.

Her father, an irrigation engineer, moved the family from the hot, dry, dusty Mallee of Victoria to the cooler climes of the island of Tasmania in 1959 where she continued her education, culminating in a BSc degree majoring in Botany and Zoology at the University of Tasmania in 1974.

She worked for several years as a laboratory technician at the Department of Agriculture at the University before becoming a full time mother.

In 1998, in the middle of raising her three sons, she was drawn back to her botanical studies and became very interested in the taxonomy of Tasmanian fungi, in particular the family Entolomataceae.

She started to publish articles on the macrofungi of Tasmania in 2002 with her long-time collaborator David Ratkowsky.

Her PhD in 2009 included a 14-month survey of a single hectare of Tasmanian bush, where she found 850 fungi species.

Genevieve co-authored 'A Field Guide to Tasmanian Fungi' in 2014. This book contains about 600 common Tasmanian fungal species, and the photos (many of which she took) were collected during about 1,000 field trips. The Field Guide was updated in 2016 to include another 50 fungi. She co-authored FungiFlip - a water-resistant, fold out pictorial guide to Tasmanian fungi, in 2018.

Genevieve has contributed thousands of fungi to institutions in Tasmania and Victoria. As a volunteer at the Tasmanian Herbarium, she provides advice regarding fungi ingestion to Tasmanian medical staff.

She is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Tasmania and volunteers around the world teaching mycology. She learned Spanish to communicate better with students in South America. She is Professor and mycologist in residence at Amazonian State University, Puyo, Ecuador, and Professor and mycologist at the National University of San Antonio Abad del Cusco.

She established the Tasmanian Fungi Facebook page in 2014. By 2022, the page had 18,000 members. She established the Field Naturalists of Tasmania Facebook page in 2015, with over 8,000 members. Genevieve posts photographs and identifies specimens frequently, including on the Facebook pages Fungi of Ecuador, and Fungi of Latin America.

Genevieve received the Australian Natural History Medallion in 2022.

She has two fungi species named after her - Lactifluus genevieveae and Fomitiporia gatesiae.

Source: Extracted from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genevieve_Gates
https://www.women.tas.gov.au/tasmanian_honour_roll_of_women/inductees/2023/dr-genevieve-gates
https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Entolomataceae_of_Tasmania.html?id=JYObgVVjb9EC&redir_esc=y
Portrait Photo: www.women.tas.gov.au

Collecting localities for 'Gates, G.M.' from AVH (2025)

Data from 10,805 specimens