Education

B.S. - Oregon State University
A.M., Ph.D. - Duke University

Dr.  Dey works primarily on fruticose and foliose macrolichens in the eastern and southeastern regions--although he has field experience in many regions of the continental United States and Hawaii. Collaborations with IWU students have included field and laboratory studies of macrolichens in the Monongahela National Forest Region of West Virginia, in the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area in Tennessee and Kentucky, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, and in Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky. Other students have worked on various herbarium specimen based lichenological projects.

During the 1990s, Dey was a member of a scientific team, with Dr. Bruce McCune of Oregon State University and Dr. Susan Will-Wolf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, developing and applying a lichen community indicator model used in monitoring the air quality in forest ecosystems in the middle Atlantic and southeastern United States as part of the National Forest Health Monitoring Program (now, in part, called the Forest Inventory and Analysis program).

Dr. Dey's current work centers on contributing to the macrolichen inventory of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as part of the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) of the Park. IWU student research assistants have helped both with field work and identifications of specimens.


Teaching

In the fall, Dr. Jonathan Dey teaches Plant and Fungal Diversity (Bio 306), the bacterial and fungal lectures of the diversity section of General Biology (Bio 101), and Directed Studies in Fungal Development and Taxonomy.  In the latter, students do two projects.  In the first they isolate, grow and follow the development of a fungus, water mold or slime mold of their choice, and, in the second they gain experience in identifying a collection of fungal specimens, typically fruticose and foliose lichens.  Dr. Dey will also offer a non-majors course in Plants and Civilization (Bio 104) in the fall. 

In the spring, Dr. Dey teaches The Microbial World (Bio 114) to non-majors and Microbiology (Bio 314) to science majors.