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. To support this, Dr. Lyons is lead PI on CyVerse, a $115M project funded by the National Science Foundation to provide cyberinfrastructure for life science research. He also developed and maintained the comparative genomics platform, CoGe, which currently manages 52,000 genomes from 21,000 organisms.  He has authored over 100 peer reviewed articles and book chapters, and teaches students how to use large-scale computing to solve problems and answer questions in biology. These publications encompass topics across genomics, bioinformatics, computer science, plant biology, microbial biology, malaria research, mammalian and avian research, and astronomy. Dr. Lyons serves on several boards of non-profit companies and research institutions, has worked in biotech, pharma, and software companies around the SF Bay Area, and has served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Plant Genome Research Program.  He earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD from UC Berkeley in Immunology, Microbial Biology, and Plant Biology, respectively.  He also founded two companies: one non-profit and one for-profit.