“Understanding why life is so diverse is fascinating to me,” Des Marais says. “Understanding how different organisms, from bacteria to dinosaurs, have figured out how to interact with their challenging environment and optimize their fitness is inherently interesting. Why plants in particular? As a geneticist and a physiologist, plants are compelling experimental systems. If I have a theory about gene X causing function Y, I can go into the lab and delete gene X from this species and put it into that species and test function directly. It’s a powerful approach.”
Des Marais does not spend all his days in a lab. In addition to directing the Parsons Laboratory, he teaches four classes at MIT and has two sons who are active in baseball and theater. He welcomes these responsibilities.
At MIT especially, he embraces service.
“The only reason MIT works is because there are people willing to sacrifice some of their research to keep the place running,” Des Marais says. “One of the things I like about academia is that there’s sort of an institutional memory, and you try to honor the legacy of where you’ve been while you shape the future.”
From California to MIT
Des Marais grew up near Stanford University as well as near facilities for NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, which meant there were always plenty of scientists and engineers around. His mother was a teacher, and his father was a geochemist with a knack for pointing out that the landscape around them was the result of geological processes dating back millions of years — a habit Des Marais admits he didn’t like at the time but that, in hindsight, influenced his thinking.
“I’m pretty sure that got into my brain, especially the idea that what looks static often comes about because of processes, and we can study those processes,” he says.
Des Marais studied integrative biology as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley. He completed his PhD at Duke University around plant genetics.
“There’s a whole series of outdoor events, from the Boy Scouts through college, that made me start to think about the challenges that plants face living in these stressful environments,” he says. “That drove me to plant science and environmental science.”
In a long postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin, Des Marais learned to conduct experiments teasing out the effect of specific genes as he studied how they changed a model plant’s relationship with water.
Des Marais came to Boston primarily for personal reasons: He and his wife, who was also a postdoc at UT Austin, entered the job market at the same time. After some awkward moments competing for the same jobs, his wife landed a tenure-track position at Harvard University. Shortly after, he joined Harvard as a staff scientist.
In 2017, Des Marais discovered 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,” Des Marais says. “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.”