Richard Korf '46, Ph.D. '50, a Cornell professor emeritus of mycology who has traveled to nearly every continent to collect fungi, was awarded the Ainsworth Medal for outstanding contributions to international mycology in early August at the International Mycological Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland.

"[The award] was a complete surprise to me and surely reflects on the work of my students as well," said Korf.

Korf's many contributions to mycology include having developed a comprehensive key to a group of fungi called Discomycetes -- a class of fungi that contains all of the cup, sponge, brain and some clublike fungi -- which are found almost everywhere, many requiring a hand lens to see them, he said.

Korf, who joined Cornell's Department of Plant Pathology in 1951, retired in 1992 and continued teaching until 1998, cites his work as chair of more than 20 Ph.D. committees as "the most important contribution I have made" to the field of mycology, he said. Most of his students, he added, have completed comprehensive studies of a particular genus, genera or family of fungi and collected a wide array of specimens in the process.

"I have collected from the Arctic to the equator, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Scandinavia, New Zealand and Australia," he said. In the Arctic, for example, he found many samples of Discomycetes in the tundra, on plants, soil and on the dung of herbivores. He also cited the tropics as the most important areas in need of exploration.

"Leaf turning is one of the things you do, and log rolling is another," he said of his searches. He has described hundreds of new species, but added that such discoveries are commonplace in his field.

Korf also has edited and republished seminal mycology texts, including an English language version of S.C. Teng's "The Fungi of China" in 1996. After the Japanese invaded China in 1937, Teng had risked his life by shipping more than 2,000 of his fungal specimens to Cornell in 1940 for safety; the specimens were housed in the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium until 2009, when they were returned to China. Korf is director emeritus of the Plant Pathology Herbarium.

Korf has also published more than 330 mycological papers and co-founded, edited and published the journal Mycotaxon in 1974, which stands as the leading publication in the world of new names and descriptions of fungi, now in its 113th volume.