David Des Marais

David Des Marais is a 2018 and 2023 principal investigator at the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is also an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering working at the interface of genomics, ecophysiology and quantitative genetics.

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. The Lab's project, 'Novel systems biology tools for improving crop tolerance to abiotic stressors', co-led by fellow J-WAFS principal investigator, Caroline Uhler, won a 2022 J-WAFS seed grant.

David is a team member of one of the 2022 MIT Climate Grand Challenges finalists for the project, 'Managing sources and sinks of carbon in terrestrial and coastal ecosystems'. In 2023, David's project 'Optimising cereal crop plant architecture during an era of high atmospheric CO2' also received J-WAFS seed grant funding, and David received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which supports promising early career faculty members who exemplify and serve as academic role models in research and education. The five-year USD 1.49 million grant was to support his project 'Mechanisms and consequences of Genotype by environment interaction in a model grass'.

David received a bachelor's from UC Berkeley and a PhD from Duke University, both in biology, before completing USDA-funded post-doctoral research at the University of Texas, Austin.