Mia Maltz

Mia Maltz is a soil microbial ecologist working at the interface of community ecology, biogeography, and mycology. Her work broadly focuses on community responses to disturbance, which feedback to influence plant and fungal community structure and ecosystem functioning. Maltz studied at the University of California, Irvine where she received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, with an emphasis on Ecological Restoration and Fungi. Her dissertation work in Kathleen Treseder’s Lab of Fungi, Ecosystems, and Global Change looked at the effects of ecosystem degradation on fungal community composition and function. Specifically, she evauated which restoration techniques affect fungi along with methods for restoring mycorrhizal fungal function within degraded landscapes. Maltz was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Biomedical Sciences at UC Riverside between 2020 and 2023. Her research overall focuses on fungal communities and functional ecology in novel ecosystems, including pumice plains, drying lakebeds, and the lung mycobiome. Microbial mediation of ecological restoration; Dispersal of airborne fungi