The Sierra Nevada range stretches across California, with the western slopes drenched by Pacific storms and the eastern side remaining arid. MIT’s Amgen Career Development Associate Professor David Des Marais spent his childhood hiking there and wondered how plants manage to thrive under such contrasting conditions, turning that curiosity into a career.
Des Marais heads the Parsons Laboratory, studying how plants interact with their environment—from single genes that alter growth to climate‑change impacts on red oak populations across the eastern United States. His work also examines how evolutionary forces reshape plant populations over time.
As a geneticist and physiologist, he finds plants to be ideal experimental systems. If he hypothesizes that gene X drives function Y, he can delete the gene in the lab and insert it into another species to test the effect directly, a powerful approach.
He does not spend every day in the lab; besides directing the lab, he teaches four MIT courses and raises two sons active in baseball and theater. He embraces academic service, noting that MIT runs because researchers are willing to sacrifice some research time for the institution’s upkeep.
Growing up near Stanford, surrounded by NASA and USGS facilities, his father—a geochemist—often reminded him that the landscape results from millions of years of geological processes, a notion that later shaped his thinking.
He studied integrative biology at UC Berkeley and earned a PhD in plant genetics at Duke. Outdoor experiences from scouting to college sparked his interest in the challenges plants face in stressful environments, steering him toward plant and environmental science.
During a long postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin, he focused on teasing out the effects of specific genes on a model plant’s water relations. He moved to Boston for personal reasons, first joining Harvard as a staff scientist, and in 2017 applied on a whim to MIT’s Civil and Environmental Engineering department, which was hiring a plant ecologist.
Des Marais splits his lab’s research into two broad themes: first, plant function, investigating how water, temperature, and nutrients shape performance; second, plant evolution, exploring how plants “make decisions” about growth, reproduction, and germination. Current projects assess climate‑change impacts on red oak—a key carbon sink—and on food crops, emphasizing that changes in plant function affect human nutrition.
Collaborating with experts in environmental chemistry and fluid mechanics, he fosters a welcoming community within the Parsons Lab, ensuring everyone feels comfortable.
He stresses that plants are the foundation of the food chain; photosynthetic efficiency determines nutrition for humans and animals, and influences carbon and water cycles. Plant biology matters profoundly for the planet.
Review: Des Marais bridges gene‑level experiments with global climate concerns, illustrating how plant research is central to understanding ecosystems and securing humanity’s future.