Funded Researchers
David L. Des Marais
- Amgen Career Development Professor
- Associate Professor
- Director of Parsons Laboratory
- Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
David Des Marais is the Amgen Career Development Professor, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and director of the Parsons Lab at MIT. He received a BA from UC Berkeley and a PhD from Duke University. Dave began focusing on plant ecophysiology while a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas, Austin. Current topics of interest include the regulatory control of stress response, resource partitioning, and climate resilience. A central theme of the Des Marais Lab is understanding the mechanisms and consequences of genotype-by-environment interaction, the widely observed phenomenon that different plant varieties respond differently to common environmental cues.
J-WAFS-funded projects
- Food security in Africa through microbiome engineering
- Optimizing cereal crop plant architecture during an era of high atmospheric CO2
- Novel systems biology tools for improving crop tolerance to abiotic stressors
News
- J-WAFS PIs receive tenure in the School of Engineering
- J-WAFS celebrates 10th anniversary of supporting water and food research across MIT
- J-WAFS project aims to replace harmful agrochemicals with microbes for sustainable agriculture
- J-WAFS PI discusses how climate change will impact cereal crops
- J-WAFS announces 2023 seed grant recipients
- J-WAFS researchers participate in ILP’s 2023 AgTech Webinar
- Climate Grand Challenges project revolutionizing agriculture with low-emissions, resilient crops
- Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects include multiple J-WAFS PIs
- Multiple J-WAFS PIs chosen as MIT Climate Grand Challenges finalists
- J-WAFS PIs team up to fortify crops for climate resilience