Talk:Kerry Knudsen

[1]

UCR volunteer and lichen expert grabs headlines by naming species after Obama

10:00 PM PDT on Thursday, April 23, 2009
By SEAN NEALON
The Press-Enterprise

Kerry Knudsen's hobby identifying plants came to a standstill in 2000. Drought had killed many plant species and left him identifying clippings from neighbors' ornamental plants. Bored, he decided to walk through his chaparral-covered backyard in Wildomar.

"I told my two daughters, 'Whatever's back there, I'm going to identify it,' " Knudsen said. "It turned out there were some lichens back there. So, I brought them back and I identified one the first day. That was enough to get me going."

Nine years later, the 58-year-old former construction worker, who dropped out of high school and doesn't have a college degree, is still going on lichens. He recently received international headlines for discovering a new lichen species and naming it after President Barack Obama, but his story is deeper than that.

He's discovered more than 25 species of lichens, which are colonies of fungus and algae or cyanobacteria that often grow on trees and rocks like moss. He's written more than 90 scientific papers about them. He's built a 10,000 specimen lichen collection at UC Riverside.

He's an internationally recognized lichen expert, which is, admittedly, a small field. He's received $150,000 in federal and state money to study lichens the past five years and is scheduled to speak later this year at Harvard.

Kerry Knudsen is an accomplished amateur lichenologist who has published 90 papers on lichens and discovered a number of new species.

He credits lichens with turning around his life after a disease, which left him unable to stand or sit for long periods of time, forcing him to retire from construction work. And, now, he's engaged to a fellow lichen expert from the Czech Republic. "I'm just doing it for fun," said Knudsen, wearing a T-shirt, jeans and hiking boots during an interview Tuesday at UCR, where he is a volunteer, or "laboratory helper," as the university Web site puts it. He gets by on disability checks and a union pension.

Long Road to Lichens

Knudsen grew up in Alhambra. He dropped out of high school in 1967 and lived in Chicago, New York City, Berkeley and a New Mexico commune before returning home three years later. He got a construction job and, at night, took classes to earn his high school diploma.

He took a leave from work in 1974 to study English at Cypress College in Orange County. Two years of literary criticism killed his love of the field. He returned to construction.

The money as a foreman overseeing demolition work was good. It supported his wife and two daughters. And, after retiring, he always figured he'd return to college to study botany, a love he developed in his early 20s

Kerry Knudsen displays one of the many lichen samples he has added to UC Riverside's herbarium.

That never happened. A genetic disease that causes blood clots in his legs got in the way.

He retired from work and doctors advised against returning to college. At the same time, Knudsen's marriage was unraveling. He was left sitting around the house, watching television and reading.

"You could tell he was bored and not used to being home all day," said Hanna Knudsen, Kerry's now 19-year-old daughter. Finding lichens changed that, she said.

ARRIVING At UCR

Backyard lichen discoveries led Knudsen to troll the Internet to identify them. That led to interaction with lichen experts throughout the country. That led to his need for a lichen collection.

Enter UCR.

The university's herbarium, which houses about 200,000 plant specimens, included about 400 lichen specimens. Knudsen asked Andrew Sanders, curator of the herbarium for 30 years, if he could work there.

"I said, 'Sure,' especially because he came as a volunteer," Sanders said. "I can use all the help I can get." Sanders, who said Knudsen is the most active lichen researcher in California, has since been impressed by his work of the man with shoulder-length hair and a bushy moustache. "Kerry is forever finding new things that are new to science," Sanders said.

Five years after Knudsen started at UCR, the lichen collection has grown to more than 10,000 specimens, including 7,000 to 8,000 he collected from rocks, tree bark and soil throughout Southern California.

He stores the specimens and 3-by-5 cards with their identifying information in shoe box-like containers in floor-to-ceiling gray filing cabinets.

The cabinets sit a few feet from Knudsen's office -- a table, covered with a computer, microscopes, lichen books and lichen samples. On the wall, photos of lichens circle a picture of his fiancée, Jana Kocourková.

Obama Lichen

Kocourková, a lichen researcher and curator of the lichen herbarium at the National Museum in Prague, learned about Knudsen after reviewing one of his papers. That led to e-mail exchanges. Now, they talk on Skype, see each three months a year and are planning to marry.

James Lendemer, a 24-year-old doctoral student at City University of New York and editor of Opuscula Philolichenum, an online lichen journal, asked Kocourková to review Knudsen's article.

In an e-mail from Chile, where he is researching lichens, Lendemer, who has known Knudsen for five years, wrote that he fits perfectly in the field because of its history of self-taught professionals.

Lendemer and Knudsen have collected lichens the past five years from San Francisco to the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains.

Knudsen has also collected in Channel Islands National Park, off the Ventura coast. That's where, in 2007, he discovered what appeared to be an unnamed lichen.

In the month leading up to last year's presidential election, Knudsen finished research on the lichen and confirmed it was unnamed. He named it Caloplaca obamae.

Knudsen said he named the lichen after Obama, whom he voted for, because of the president's appreciation for science and science research. Obama couldn't be reached for comment.

Since Knudsen's four-page paper on the new species was published earlier this month in Opuscula Philolichenum, it has been written about from Russia to Vietnam, Knudsen said.

He said the interest from around the world has been a surprise. "It has something to do with Obama," he said. "Not lichens."

Reach Sean Nealon at 951-368-9458 or snealon@PE.com

lichen man
Kerry Knudsen
Knudsen, a construction worker-turned-lichen expert, recently made headlines for naming a lichen after President Obama, but his connection to lichens is much deeper.

AGE: 58
RESIDENCE: Wildomar
FACT: Engaged to a lichen expert in the Czech Republic

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