About the author

Eric Lam

Eric Lam is currently a Professor of Plant Science at the Biotech Center of Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, as well as holding the Chair of Botany at the University of Hong Kong. He received his B.Sc. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, in 1980 and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, USA, in 1984, where he worked with Richard Malkin on the structure and composition of electron-transfer-protein complexes in the chloroplast membrane. He carried out his postdoctoral work between 1985 and 1989 with Nam-Hai Chua at the Rockefeller University in New York City, USA, where he studied plant-gene-regulation mechanisms. He joined the faculty at Rutgers University in 1989, becoming a full Professor in 1999. In 2001, he took a leave-of-absence of 3 years to take up the Botany Chair at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the mechanisms of programmed-cell-death control and global chromatin organization in plants. He is an author on over 100 publications and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the United States Department of Agriculture.