Gerald Presley

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Roots

I was born during August 1989, in Kankakee, Illinois, USA a short drive south of Chicago. I grew up in the Chicago area in the south and southwest suburbs. I’ve since escaped the urban sprawl to Oregon never to look back excepting occasional family visits.

Education and Career

I attended Eastern Illinois University (EIU) to pursue a Batchelor of Science in Biology with a Chemistry Minor. During this time I gained an interest in fungi while attending a variety of mushroom forays with EIU faculty and regional mushroom clubs. I also started tinkering with fungi in the lab during this time, something I would continue to do in my career. I graduated in 2011 and moved up north to Minneapolis, Minnesota to pursue a Ph. D. in the Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering department at the University of Minnesota (UMN). There I studied various aspects of fungal wood decay mechanisms and interspecific competition under Jonathan Schilling. I was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship while at UMN which funded the bulk of my Ph.D. and made me eligible to apply for a USAID Research and Innovation Fellowship based in Cape Town, South Africa which I was awarded. After a year detour in South Africa working on sorghum biomass decay, I came back with a bride and a lot of work to finish up. I received my Ph. D. in 2018 and moved south for a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory working on bacterial genetics of lignin decomposition with Joshua Michener and Jim Elkins for a year and 9 months. I then wound up taking a tenure track assistant professor position offered to me at Oregon State University (OSU) recently vacated by Jeff Morrell. Since then, I have been busy pursuing wood durability research and whatever other opportunities come my way.

Research

My research program at OSU has grown into a bit of a chimera strung together by fungal filaments and wood fibers. The core of my research program is supported by two research cooperatives composed of private companies and public utilities and focuses on testing methods for improving wood pole durability and the environmental impacts of treated wood. I inherited these research cooperatives as part of the position at OSU and they are integral to my position. This engine provides most of the research presented from my group to the IRGWP and the American Wood Protection Association. I also research other aspects of wood durability notably improving quality control methods for thermally modified woods, quantifying adhesive and preservative interactions in wood composites, and developing inspection methods for mass timber composites in service. Beyond wood durability, my group has taken on projects focused on applied mycology specifically focused on describing methods for utilizing fungi to break down plastics or capture heavy metals in the soil. Finally, we have also forayed into the field of wood biomass thermochemical conversion and bioenergy with a project focused on quantifying the environmental impacts of deriving liquid fuels from forestry wastes.

Family life

I met my wife in Cape Town, South Africa in 2015 in a pub while i was there supported on a USAID Research and Innovation Fellowship. We married for the first time in December of 2016 in front of a judge in St. Paul, MN and then a second time, validly in the eyes of God, in her hometown of Killarney, Ireland in November of 2017. After an unnecessarily long spousal visa process of about 15 months she was able to move straight to Tennessee just as I was starting my postdoc where we had our first child. We now have four children ranging from newborn to 6 years old, a home in Albany, Oregon, and six suburban hens. Outside of family life and work I find some time to garden and make passable, not professional, indoor and outdoor furniture out of wood.

This bio was written for the January 2025 IRG Newsletter.