2025 Dwyer Lecture Is November 7
Discover how the plants we eat have evolved over the past century, and what we still don't know about them, at the 2025 John Dwyer Lecture at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Scientist Colin Khoury will outline major trends in food plant diversity over the past century and explore what is not well understood about these changes, offering ideas about what can be done to address knowledge gaps. Given the rapid decline of many facets of food plant diversity, Khoury will conclude by highlighting efforts at different scales to mitigate, stem, and reverse further losses of food plant diversity in a changing world.
The lecture, sponsored by the Missouri Botanical Garden and Saint Louis University’s Department of Biology, is free and open to the public. It will take place at 4 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 7 in the Bayer Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
About Colin Khoury
Colin Khoury is a biodiversity, agriculture, and conservation scientist with over 25 years of experience in nonprofit, international, government, industry, and academic organizations in the United States, Europe, and South America. He holds a PhD from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and a Master of Science from the University of Birmingham, UK. He works with both the botanic garden and crop genebank communities as an affiliate scientist at the New York Botanical Garden and Missouri Botanical Garden. His primary areas of focus include food plant diversity, biocultural conservation, and plant genetic resources, including crops and their wild relatives.
About the annual John Dwyer Lecture in Biology
The annual Lecture honors the memory of John Dwyer, Ph.D., a professor of biology at Saint Louis University and a research associate of the Missouri Botanical Garden. The office of the President at the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Department of Biology at Saint Louis University are proud to honor this memory by bringing inspiring scientists to a public audience in St. Louis.