Seeds of a Sustainable Future

Speaker: 
Colin Khoury
 
27 Feb 2017
 
8:00 PM
 
Great Hall, Memorial Union

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Colin Khoury studies diversity in the crops people grow and eat worldwide, and the implications of change in this diversity on human health and environmental sustainability. He is particularly interested in the wild relatives of crops native to the United States. Khoury is a research scientist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) headquartered in Cali, Colombia, and at the USDA National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado. He previously worked at the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Rome, the organization that collaborated with the Norwegian government and Nordic Genebank to create the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. University Symposium on Sustainability Keynote.

The Symposium on Sustainability will host a poster display and reception prior to the lecture, 7-8pm, in the South Ballroom.
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Colin Khoury is the lead author of "Origins of Food Crops Connect Countries Worldwide," which was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The study estimates the degree to which countries use foreign crops – that is, crops from regions other than their own - and quantifies changes in this usage over the past 50 years. The results provide a novel perspective on the ongoing globalization of food systems worldwide, and bolster evidence for the importance of international collaboration on genetic resource conservation and exchange. Khoury earned his PhD in production ecology and resource conservation at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.