About Me
Work Life
My name is Jeekin Lau and I am a peach rootstock breeder for the USDA-ARS at the Southeastern Fruit and Tree Nut Research Station in Byron, GA. My main mission is to find host plant resistance to Armillaria Root Rot and Peach Tree short life. Other research goals are developing rootstocks that have differing growth habits to provide farmers the rootstock choice to do high density plantings with non-traditional non-open-center-vase growth types (ie. central leader / fruiting wall or Y-shape). In addition to this work, I am also interested in breeding low chill requirement peach scion varieties that may be suitable for certain regions that are not getting enough chill hours due to changes in climate. Link to lab website
I was a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University where my main areas of interest were/are genomics, genetics, phenotyping, machine learning, and image recognition. What sets me apart from most researchers is that I am one of the few people in the world that is extremely familiar with the under workings of most of the current auto-polyploid genetic software. It is my goal to bring the tools that I have learned that have recently been developed to the diploid Prunus species.
By training I am a field based researcher with a strong background in running field based replicated trials for both pesticide efficacy trials and for traditional field based plant breeding. My strong skills are linkage and QTL mapping, GWAS, Genomic Selection, and mixed modeling for phenotypic data.
Although my background was heavily field based, roughly around the year 2020, I pivoted more heavily towards bioinformatics and statistical modeling for phenotyping data. As genetic studies are limited many times by the quality of phenotypic data, the ability to accurately measure plant expression of genetics.
Interesting Projects
One of my newest projects is developing pipelines for using RGB cameras to capture pictures of seeds, thorns, etc. and measure the size of these objects using opencv. Details found here https://github.com/jeekinlau/seed_counter_pipeline_opencv
Personal Life
I am married to Hannah and we have a cute little baby named Emmy Rose. You should guess why her middle name is Rose. My interests include lifting weights, cooking, and going on walks with Hannah and Emmy.
In my spare time I like to tinker with things whether that is fixing something around the apartment or working on my truck or playing around with code.
In my free time I also the website dev for the Early Learning Center my wife worked at. Link to website