Eric Lam is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Biology at Rutgers University, NJ. He had served as the Director for the Biotechnology Center for Agriculture and the Environment at Rutgers from 2008 to 2010. He also serves on the advisory board for the Rutgers Energy Institute. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley and completed his postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller University on Plant Molecular Biology. His research interests include the study of mechanisms that control programmed cell death and stress tolerance in plants, the regulation of global gene expression via chromatin organization, and more recently, the establishment and promotion of an aquatic agriculture platform with duckweed for sustainable biomass production. Currently, he is leading a team of U.S. researchers that completed a high-fidelity reference genome for the Greater Duckweed Spirodela ployrhiza using NGS and Genome Feature Mapping technologies. His approach emphasizes the use of evolutionary relationships and genomics to identify candidate genes and enzymes for critical metabolic switches in cell wall metabolism and other traits important for the fast growth and metabolic traits of duckweeds. Dr. Lam is author on over 150 publications in journals including Science and Nature and has been awarded 5 patents relating to biotechnology methods. He is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt award in Molecular Biology (2007) and a Fulbright-Brazil Science Fellow (2014-15).