Meet the scientist who is the 'World champion of fungus'

Kiers, who studies fungal networks and won a MacArthur Grant recently, in her Amsterdam, Netherlands apartment. — MELISSA SCHRIEK/The New York Times

On Jan 13, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, sometimes described as the "green Nobel Prize”, was awarded to Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist at Vrije University Amsterdam who has spent the past three decades studying the workings and significance of the soil’s circulatory system.

Last year, Kiers won a MacArthur "genius” award, as well as the Climate Breakthrough Award, sharing it with Giuliana Furci, a fungi conservationist, and Merlin Sheldrake, a mycologist at the University of Oxford.