Speaker Bio

Ken Cameron

Ken Cameron is an Associate Professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Wisconsin and the Director of the Wisconsin State Herbarium. His research focuses on Orchid evolution, classification, molecular relationships, and especially on Vanilla. Prior to his appointment at the University of Wisconsin, he was a botanist for 10 years at the NY Botanical Garden. Previously this year, Dr. Cameron provided the keynote address at the Quito Orchid Expo in Ecuador.

Dr. Ken Cameron joined the Department of Botany at UW-Madison in 2008 as an Associate Professor and Director of the Wisconsin State Herbarium. For nearly ten years prior, he was the Director of the Molecular Systematics Laboratory at The New York Botanical Garden. Ken and his students have been researching the evolution and classification of various orchid groups since the mid-1990s when DNA sequencing technology promised to revolutionize orchid systematics.

As a Ph.D. student at the University of NC-Chapel Hill and later at Kew Gardens in London he studied under the well known orchidologist Dr. Mark Chase. During that time, Ken published the first DNA based study of relationships within the orchid family, and eventually focused his research on Vanilla and its relatives (subfamily Vanilloideae), which is his specialty. Of his more than 50 publications to date, most are concerned with orchid biology. He just published the ninth volume of Orchid Biology Reviews and Perspectives along with Joe Arditti, and is currently working on a new book on the Natural History of Vanilla Orchids.

Ken’s interest in orchids started at an early age when he became fascinated by the pink lady's slippers that grew around his family's cabin in northern Michigan. He is now sharing that passion for orchids with a new generation of students at UW.