Ed was born in Ft. Wayne, Indiana on June 18, 1927 to Eli J. and Minnie L. Oyer. After graduating from Central High School in Ft. Wayne in 1945, he joined the U.S. Navy and served on Guam in the Pacific Oceantheatre. After completing his military service, he attended Purdue University and received B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from that university. Following completion of his studies, Edwin joined the faculty of the Department of Vegetable Crops in the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University in February 1955. He was awarded a NATO Fellowship in Science in 1961 to conduct vegetable research at Le Phytotron in Gif-surYvette, France. He joined Purdue University's Department of Horticulture as a faculty member from 1963 to 1966 after which he returned to Cornell as Chair of the Department of Vegetable Crops. His experiences in international agriculture began in 1971 when he was tapped by Cornell to serve as the final Project Leader of the Graduate Education Program of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture – Cornell University (UPCO) Project that ended a 20-year collaboration between these two institutions of higher learning. While in the Philippines he was invited to join the late Robert F. Chandler, Jr. in the establishment of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC) on Taiwan where he served as Deputy Director of Research while on leaveof-absence from Cornell from 1972 to 1974. He returned to Cornell as Director of the International Agriculture Program in July 1974. Ed resigned from Cornell in January 1977 to join the newly established International Agricultural Development Service where he served as the Project Leader for a World Bank financed project to establish the Indonesia Agency for Agricultural Research and Development (IAARD). This assignment extended to September 1982 when he returned to Cornell once again to resume his position as Director of the International Agricultural Program in which he served until he took semi-retirement in 1987 and fully retired in 1992.