Dr. Kin Lau joined the Institute’s Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Core in February 2019. He earned his B.Sc. in biology at Davidson College and his Ph.D. in plant genetics and breeding at Purdue University. After his Ph.D., Dr. Lau became a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University, where he worked on identifying genetic variants associated with orange flesh color in sweet potato, drought response in the sweet potato transcriptome and discovery of genes involved in producing important secondary metabolites in medicinal plants. Dr. Lau brings experience in a variety of next-generation sequencing-based methods including variant calling, genome and transcriptome assembly, comparative genomics, differential gene expression analysis and Nanopore cDNA sequencing.