MIT Researcher David Des Marais Studies Plant Water Relations

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher David Des Marais studies how plants interact with their environment, treating vegetation as the living foundation of global water and food cycles.

David Des Marais Investigates Plant Water Relations at MIT

Directing the Parsons Laboratory in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Des Marais examines how plants interact with their environment across molecules and mountain ranges. His research spans individual gene functions up to regional climate impacts on red oak tree populations across the eastern United States. Des Marais originally grew up near Stanford University, surrounded by NASA and U.S. Geological Survey facilities, before earning an undergraduate degree in integrative biology from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD in plant genetics from Duke University.

Des Marais came to Boston primarily for personal reasons when he and his wife entered the job market together. After his wife secured a tenure-track position at Harvard University, he joined Harvard as a staff scientist before discovering in 2017 that MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was hiring a plant ecologist.

I don’t even think of myself as a plant ecologist, but I applied on a whim and they were interested. I do a lot around plant water relations, and I joke that there are all these hydrologists in the department who study how water moves through the soil and into the atmosphere through these magical pipes. The magical pipes are plants, which play an important role in the water cycle. I realized a ton of people at MIT were studying that phenomenon at regional or global scales, but no one really studied how or why plants move water in the first place.

David Des Marais

Current Laboratory Projects Examine Climate Change Impacts on Red Oak Trees

Today, lab work led by Des Marais focuses on how plants interact with their environment, including how climate change will impact populations of red oak trees across the eastern U.S. His work also considers how evolutionary forces act on plants to change populations over time.

We know that climate change is impacting plant function, and it’s impacting plant nutrition, and that impacts human nutrition. Climate change is going to affect where we can grow which plants efficiently and how we can get them where they need to be eaten. All that stuff is critically important for humans.

David Des Marais