2023 John Dwyer Lecture in Biology Will Be November 10

10/27/2023

The 2023 John Dwyer Lecture in Biology is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 10.

The lecture, sponsored by the Missouri Botanical Garden and Saint Louis University’s Department of Biology, will feature Shahina Ghazanfar, Ph.D., Senior Botanist Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Her lecture is titled “Plants of the Quran: History and Culture.”  

The lecture is free and open to the public. The lecture will begin at 4 p.m. at the Missouri Botanical Garden, Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center and Bayer Event Center

The annual John Dwyer Lecture in Biology honors the memory of Dr. John Dwyer, a professor of biology at Saint Louis University and a research associate of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

A book signing follows the lecture.

“Plants of the Qur’ān, History and Culture” is the first book to explore and highlight the history of the plants mentioned in the Qur’ān. It delves into the historical and current cultural significance of the 30 most-featured plants from the Qur’ān, like castor oil, myrtle, and food plants like ginger, garlic and dates. The book explores traditional and present use of these plants, including as food and medicine, and the context in which plants are mentioned in the Qur’ān.

Looking at these plants from a current perspective, the book also advocates for conservation and sustainable use of plants and their habitats as many face threats from climate change and human impact on their natural habitats.

Ghazanfar was educated at the Universities of Punjab and Cambridge, and has been based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, since 2001. She is co-editor of the Flora of Tropical East Africa, a detailed taxonomic account of the roughly 12,000 plant species found in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, for which she researched and wrote the account of the family Scrophulariaceae. She also co-organized, and edited the proceedings, of the 17th AETFAT Congress in Addis Ababa in 2003.

Her main areas of research are the systematics, vegetation, and biogeography of Oman, Arabia, and Pakistan. She has published a detailed account of the biochemistry and usage of Arabian medicinal plants and is the author of the first ever Flora of Oman. As an expert on the Arabian Peninsula, she is often consulted on its native flora, medicinal and perfume plants, and since 1992 has made numerous environmental assessments of development projects and proposed nature reserves in the region.

In addition to writing and editing scientific publications, she is an accomplished botanical artist who has illustrated most of her books and all her research papers. The British Council in Oman mounted a solo exhibition of her watercolors in 1993.

Ghazanfar is on the editorial board of Systematics and Geography of Plants, and a member of the Linnean Society, AETFAT, IAPT, the Society for Arabian Studies, the Society of Economic Botany, and the Arabian Plant Specialist Group of the Species Survival Commission, IUCN.