Dr. Cranos Williams is the Goodnight Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Analytics at North Carolina State University with primary and secondary appointments in the electrical and computer engineering and plant and microbial biology departments, respectively. Dr. Williams also serves as the Platform Director of the Data-Driven Plant Sciences research platform of the North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative (https://cals.ncsu.edu/psi/) and is the head of the EnBiSys Research Laboratory (https://research.ece.ncsu.edu/enbisys/). He received his B.S. in electrical engineering from North Carolina A&T State University in 2001, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University in 2002 and 2008, respectively. Dr. Williams has developed a highly collaborative, multidisciplinary research program focused on understanding biomolecular pathways associated with plant growth, development, and adaptation. His research lab develops methodologies familiar to other areas of electrical and computer engineering (e.g. computational intelligence, system identification, nonlinear systems analysis and control, and signal processing) to model and predict the impact that genetic and environmental perturbations have on overall plant response. The results from these works will have direct implications on key challenges associated with engineering plants for efficient biofuel production, increased adaptability to changing environments, and improved defense to biotic and abiotic stresses.