About Jeekin

About Me

Hello, as mentioned in the first post, I am Jeekin Lau. Here is a little about me.

Undergraduate and Masters

I went to Auburn University where I got a BS in Horticulture focusing on Fruit and Vegetable Production. I then continued at Auburn to get my Master’s with Dr. Wheeler Foshee in pesticide efficacy in vegetable crops (mainly solanaceous crops) and pecans. However my own research was focused on alternative uses for industrial starchy sweetpotatoes after fermentation and ethanol extraction.

PhD and postdoc

I then went to Texas A&M University to study under Dr. David Byrne where I worked on my PhD in the department of Horticulture with a focus on plant breeding in auto-tetraploid garden roses. My main focus was looking at host plant resistance of roses to Rose Rosette virus (RRV) and I was funded on an UDSA SCRI grant “Combating Rose Rosette.” Most of my degree was focused on creating mapping populations and studying these populations for disease resistance for RRV, black spot, cercospora leaf spot, defoliation, architecture traits. This work culminated in thus far two papers:

After my PhD I stayed in the same lab as a postdoc, under the new PI, Dr. Oscar Riera-Lizarazu. During my postdoc, I worked on more genomics related projects looking at the diversity of rose germplasm as related to our program and began to help implement genomic selection in our program. During my time as a PhD student I had gained much experience with many of the new tools for analyzing autopolyploid genetics, one of my key roles was to test this software with our real datasets. Many of these tools are part of a large USDA SCRI grant “Tools for Polyploids”.