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Dr. Eric Lam

Distinguished Professor
Dr. Eric Lam.

Dr. Eric Lam
Department of Plant Biology
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
59 Dudley Road, Foran Hall, Room 216
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8520
848-932-6351
lam@sebs.rutgers.edu

Affiliations


CV (PDF) Google Scholar

Biography

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).

Title and Address:
Distinguished Professor
Department of Plant Biology
School of Environmental and Biological Sciences,
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Primary Focus Area: Plant Breeding and Genetics
Secondary Focus Area: Plant Protection and Biotic and Abiotic Interactions

Laboratory Website

Dr. Eric Lam (on the right) Zoom in
Dr. Eric Lam (on the right), shown here with colleagues from Rutgers and OSU at the Piracicaba campus of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, is an active organizer for the Tripartite Community between the three Intitutions to promote collaboration in research and education between their faculties.
Picture of a Wolffia australiana 8730 plant Zoom in
Picture of a Wolffia australiana 8730 plant, one species in the genus with the smallest flowering plants in the world and is among the most derived species in the duckweed family. The Lam lab is currently working to produce a high quality sequence map for its 375 Mbp genome in order to use this species as a plant model for growth, genome organization, evolution and synthetic biology studies.