Funded Researchers

David L. Des Marais
- Gale Assistant Professor
- Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
David L. Des Marais (PI) an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering working at the interface of genomics, ecophysiology, and quantitative genetics. He received his BA at UC Berkeley and PhD at Duke University, both in biology, before completing a USDA-funded post-doc the University of Texas at Austin. He joined MIT after an appointment as a research associate at Harvard. The Des Marais Lab is generally interested in how plants perceive, integrate, and respond to complex environmental cues at the cellular and whole-plant scale. Specific topics of interest include the regulatory control of stress response, biomass allocation in fluctuating environments, and the interaction between abiotic and biotic stressors in natural ecological systems.