Emeritus Executive Board
Carolyn Lawrence-Dill is the Associate Dean for Research and Discovery in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a Professor in the Departments of Agronomy and Genetics, Development and Cell Biology. Her research program is devoted to developing computational systems that support the plant research community. Her lab's work enables the use of existing and emerging knowledge to establish common standards and methods for data collection, integration, and sharing.
Dr. Lawrence-Dill's predictive plant phenomics project focuses on three areas: Developing standards that democratize data access and analysis and enable community development of systems that interoperate; creating examples of successful phenotypic prediction enabled by developed standards, a proof of concept, and to advance novel concepts for downstream broad implementation; and developing a coordinated network of research groups to develop and deploy data standards relevant to genotypic diversity, environmental documentation, and phenotypic prediction.
Dr. Eric Lyons is an associate professor in the school of Plant Sciences at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on scalable computational systems and infrastructure to support and accelerate life science research, and the structure, evolution, and dynamics of genomes. To support this, Dr. Lyons is a co-PI on CyVerse, a $115M project funded by the National Science Foundation to provide cyberinfrastructure for life science research; his research group develops and maintains the comparative genomics platform, CoGe, which currently stores over 50,000 genomes and provides dynamic tools for analyzing, comparing, and visualizing genomic data. He has authored over 100 peer reviewed articles and book chapters. He teaches a project-based course at the University of Arizona called Applied Concepts in Cyberinfrastructure, which teaches and develops collaborative computing skills to a diverse group of students to solve a real-world data challenge. Each year a different research team is the class client, and the students learn to work as a team to develop a novel, scalable computing solution to accelerate research. Projects have spanned disease vectors, exo-planet detection, and ecosystem modeling.
Dr. Lyons also serves on the boards of the nonprofit Phoenix Bioinformatics, LLC located in Redwood City, CA, The Plant Sciences Institute at Iowa State University, and The Boyce Thompson Institute located in Ithaca, NY. Dr. Lyons has a bachelor’s degree in Immunology, Master's degree in Microbial Biology, and Ph.D. in Plant Biology, all earned at University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the University of Arizona, Dr. Lyons worked in biotech, pharma, and software companies around the San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently serving as a rotating Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Plant Genome Research Program.
