Student case studies

David Satori

David reveals how his passion for fungi and experience on the Kew MSc course led him to co-found his own start-up company and consultancy business.

I first discovered the MSc course whilst attending Kew’s State of the World’s Fungi symposium in 2018.

As a budding mycologist, I was eager to learn more about the subject and was thrilled to have found perhaps the only postgraduate mycology course in the UK at the time.

Fungi have fascinated me since childhood but all my learning up until then was independent. I knew that working with world-class researchers at Kew would allow me to learn so much more than was possible through books alone.

More than anything, the MSc expanded my interest in other subjects including botany, taxonomy and practical conservation, which was made possible by our field trip to Madagascar.

My main interest throughout the MSc was exploring the intersection between human livelihoods and wildlife in this age of biodiversity loss.

This led me to take a detour for my MSc research project to study the conservation and use of crop wild relatives to enhance agricultural resilience.

After graduating, I was offered a job working as a species conservation researcher at Kew, where I analysed historical data of tropical plant distributions to feed into IUCN Red List assessments.

I then founded Rhizocore Technologies, a start-up company that utilises native ectomycorrhizal fungi to accelerate woodland regeneration and have since worked with organisations such as Trees for Life.

I also run Rewilding Mycology, a consultancy where I explore the role that fungi can play in rewilding and have conducted fungal diversity surveys for projects such as the Natural Capital Laboratory in the Scottish Highlands.

Every strand of my work can be traced back to what I learnt during my time studying at Kew, and it remains at the forefront of mycological education as the ecological importance of fungi becomes ever more widely appreciated

Yannick Woudstra

Yannick explains how the MSc was a stepping stone from a broad-based BSc to botanical research for a PhD.

I’m from The Netherlands where I did my first degree in Chemistry and Biology. Afterwards I looked for a degree where I could specialise in botany to pursue my interest in plant evolution.

Kew Gardens was familiar to me from TV documentaries and I found out about the MSc on the website.  

One of the most valuable experiences for me was interacting with lots of different teaching staff, many of whom career botanists with in-depth knowledge.

I particularly enjoyed the taxonomy of flowering plants - something my previous studies had not covered.

Teaching staff from both Kew and QMUL are very good at enthusing students about botany – it is an understudied branch of biology and needs more researchers.

Kew itself is an inspiring place to study, whether exploring the diversity of plants in the gardens or in the Herbarium.

Not only could I look at living tropical plants, but I learnt to identify them too. 

The fieldtrip to Madagascar trip was memorable, travelling around with local botanists who showed us first-hand how areas of deforestation had led to soil erosion and listening to them recalling what the area was like before.

It was above all inspiring to see their passion for botany and their endless knowledge of the local plants. Madagascar has more than 12,000 plant species and they knew most of them. 

My research project on the evolution of flowers gave me the chance to be part of a research group for six months.

There I met a colleague who later became my PhD supervisor at Kew. I’m now researching the genomics of aloes, developing tools for their identification and using them as a model group to study the evolution of succulence in plants.

So I’m still to be found looking at tropical plants in the garden, Herbarium and in the laboratory.