Meet the Funga Team: Alison Ketz

Get to know the Funga crew with this newest installment of our "Meet the Team" series. Come back monthly to meet more team members, hear about their journey to Funga, and understand their vital role in our community.

Alison climbing a via ferratta in the Dolomites, Italy.

We’re big fans of the “Today I get to….” mentality. So, what do you get to do every day at Funga?

I am a nature detective. What if a forest could talk? I help nature ‘speak’ by turning measurements from forests into numbers, pictures, and things we can understand. I reconfigure data and factual information in ways that reveal trends, raise issues, identify opportunities, and offer solutions. I get to use computer programming to determine the best soil inoculants and make predictions about forest productivity. I also get to use communication skills to help others understand really complex scientific information. There’s so many challenging things about forests and soil that we don’t know, and I get to ask these questions every day.

If you had to explain what Funga does to a third grader, what would you say?

I just got to speak to multiple classrooms of third-graders today for my son’s elementary school career day! It was so fun, third graders totally get it, and they asked excellent questions.

At Funga, we figure out what good healthy soils can produce the biggest pine trees possible. When we grow trees bigger, we can remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This results in carbon credits that big companies pay us for, so that they can balance their carbon footprint, or the amount of carbon they put into the atmosphere by doing their own businesses. Working pine forests are actually a great source of material that we need to sustainably build things. But, we also know that clear-cutting these forests, which is what we do to make timber, destroys the fungal communities that the trees rely on. We inoculate trees with a tiny amount of fungi from old healthy forests, that can allow newly planted seedlings to grow into trees as big as possible. We help trees and soil to be healthier and we have a real impact on climate change.

Alison with her family at Meow Wolf.

Tell us a little bit about your life. How did it lead you to Funga?

I’ve always loved mathematics growing up, and loved spending time in nature. I was a girl scout all the way through high school, and these experiences led me to develop an enormous value for the natural world. I actually studied photography during undergrad because I loved combining highly technical skills with the ambiguity of art. I ended up disliking that as a career though since it’s mostly about sales. When I decided to go back to school, I rediscovered that I was still very strong quantitatively. I went to grad school for statistics and ultimately decided to work on applying statistics to environmental systems, and to pursue a PhD in Ecology. I studied elk in Rocky Mountain National Park during my PhD and then studied chronic wasting disease in white-tailed deer as a research scientist in academia. This is a disease for which we are powerless to do anything – there is no cure, no treatment, no vaccines, no way to stop it. All the fanciest models we can think of aren’t going to fix this problem. I wanted my work to have a real impact on climate change. This led me to look into climate-tech startup companies. I thrive off of uncertainty and love jumping into new challenges head first, which are qualities that are really necessary to work in a start-up. It has been so fun to learn about fungi and forests, and I truly believe that we are going to make an enormous difference to combat climate change.

What is your favorite part of the job?

I love, like truly love, in the nerdiest possible way, how we can use mathematics and statistics to describe nature. It takes teamwork, and abstract thinking. I love getting to brainstorm about new ideas and new approaches and new data that we could learn from, to try to further our understanding and to further scientific discovery.

What is one workflow/productivity tool or trick that you can’t live without?

I learned years ago that I have to move and use my body intensely to think and sleep better. I try to do this on a daily basis. I’ve solved many difficult modeling and analysis problems while running or climbing or snowboarding or doing yoga. I also usually bike to work, and this lets me start my day with a smile.

Alison and her son skiing in Leadville, Colorado.

What trivia round would you know every answer to?

Art/photo history

Can you share a favorite memory of/with the Funga team?

Last fall I went with Caylon and Lily to one of our field trials in eastern Texas. It’s always useful to go to see experiments in person, because it gives me ideas and allows me to be creative with my work. Mathematical and statistical models can be greatly improved when you can account for things that you would otherwise ignore, like hydrology or fine-scale topography. Even at this field trial, we found a lot of variation in the soil across space. We were there to sample soils to assess fungal creep, or how fungal inoculants could be dispersing over space and time. It was incredibly hot, incredibly sunny, and incredibly hard work. We had to search through a car wash of brush just to find the loblolly pine seedlings. We even game-ified this search and cheered each other on as much as we could to help us keep going. This positivity, team-work, and can-do culture is motivating and balances all the hard challenges that we try to tackle in our work.