Richard Neville Lester (13 June 1937 – 4 April 2006) was an English botanist and chemotaxonomist.
He was a student and later (1958) research assistant of Jack Hawkes and took part in potato collecting expeditions to Central America and Mexico.
He spent a year (1968-1969) in Uganda as a lecturer in botany at Makerere University, where he developed his life long interest in the African eggplant, Solanum melongena.
[6] In 1980, together with his student Peter Jaeger, he started a taxonomic revision of all African Solanum species, which remained incomplete at the time of his death.
He remained active in retirement and worked (2000-2005) as coordinator of EGGNET [8] where he oversaw the transfer of the endangered Solanaceae collection at Birmingham to Nijmegen Botanical Garden, INRA Montfavet, and Valencia Polytechnic University.