Erick Lins was born and raised in Brazil, and attended the University of Brasília where he obtained his bachelor's degree in Chemistry. Right after graduating, he began working at the General Coordination of Laboratories of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply. In that position, Erick was part of the team in charge of setting the strategic goals to the National Agricultural Laboratory Network, in order to support the inspection branch with an advanced analytical basis. This work was directly focused on food production systems and the identification of pesticide residues in several products, and had state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation and quality assurance as fundamental parts of it. After obtaining his master’s degree in Chemistry, working with the development of analytical systems based on flow injection, Erick went to pursue his PhD at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada, with in situ spectroelectromicroscopy, along with his wife Verônica and their daughter Rebeca.