Dave Des Marais

Maybe b/c the grad students don't show up to class in their PJs?

Overheard just now in the hallway, as students left my class: “One of the fun things about taking classes with grad students is that everyone dresses really nicely”

Shaping the future through systems thinking MIT senior Ananda Santos Figueiredo aims to create a better future using systems thinking.

Super inspiring profile of a great student. I'm proud to have taught and worked with Ananda over the past two years.
news.mit.edu/2025/shaping...

Congrats to Meghan Blumstein and Sophie Webster for this great study on exploiting genomics to better understand the effect of urban heat islands on tree phenology! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Executive Director MIT - Executive Director - Cambridge MA 02139

MIT's Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab is searching for a new (non-faculty) Executive Director. This is a great opportunity to connect MIT PIs and stakeholders around the world. careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...

Cologne Spring Meeting continues with “Resurrecting plants for climate change research” by Niek Scheepens from @unituebingen.bsky.social Innovating plant resurrection techniques to study climate adaptation. #ClimateChange #PlantResurrection #TRR341 #DFG

I really enjoyed presentation by @seemasheth.bsky.social at the Cologne Spring Meeting. Absolutely heroic field work addressing local adaptation with a great model system

Does domestication trade-off stress tolerance for leaf growth? A search for evidence across eight Pooideae grass species Plant domestication is thought to create trade-offs between high yield and stress tolerance, raising concerns about yield stability in future climates. Previous studies have found limited direct evide...

New preprint from the lab! PhD student Jie Yun developed a nice computational pipeline to test long-standing hypotheses about life history trade-offs associated with domestication. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations to Dr. Haoran Cai!!! @haorancai.bsky.social successfully defended his thesis earlier today in MIT CEE and is moving to UCLA to begin a post-doc.

My department, Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of Minnesota is looking for a new head and colleague in any area of Plant and/or Microbial Biology. Job ad: hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/ext/365...
So please spread the word to anyone who might be interested. Thank you 😁

In conversation with… Joanne Chory “I’m excited that people are finally letting us remind them that plants exist and that they are here for a reason,” says Professor Joanne Chory, plant geneticist at the Plant Biology Group of the Salk...

Very sad to hear of the passing of Joanne Chory, who was an iconic scientist and person. Truly, one can say she spent her whole career trying to make a better planet and a better environment in science for all.

Interview: www.sebiology.org/resource/in-...
TED talk: www.ted.com/speakers/joa...

Assistant Professor of Forest Ecophysiology APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS: CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, a...

So excited to announce our department is hiring a tenure track position in Forest Ecophysiology! Happy to answer any questions about the position!! Join us in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at Penn State!
psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/PSU_Ac...

My department at MIT has a joint search with the College of Computing in computation for environmental life sciences. Please apply, and pass along! faculty-searches.mit.edu/cee-scc/

Every picture in the CSHL bar

New postdocs fellowship at MIT for folks interested in applications of AI. Fellows will have advisors in both AI and a discipline. Please reach out if interested in applying cutting edge AI to the microbiome or microbial evolution!
computing.mit.edu/tayebati-pos...

I am currently searching for a new postdoc to conduct research using amazing data sets that we have accumulated over years through research on a continental-scale array of field experiments with switchgrass genetic mapping/GWAS populations. careers.msu.edu/en-us/job/52...

Disentangling variational bias: the roles of development, mutation, and selection The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While most population genetic frameworks assumes that random muta...

Thrilled to share my recent perspective piece with
@diogromelo.bsky.social
and
@evodaveo.bsky.social
on the empirical measurement of developmental bias in a GP map and its conceptual links with other quant gen variational properties.

www.cell.com/trends/genet...

We're looking for two Asst Profs, one with @MIT_SCC on computation and environmental life sciences. Join Otto Cordero, Tami Lieberman, Cesar TerrerDarcy McRose, Serguei Saavedra and I to expand our impact in this essential area. Please apply! faculty-searches.mit.edu/cee-scc/

Attending #Evol2024? Got a good plant biology story to tell? Come join New Phytologist associate editors Robin Hopkins and me to learn about publishing at New Phytologist. Palais d Congres 445B Saturday at 12:30. Journal swag and light fare provided!

Phenomenal work from Jia-Wei Wang’s lab provides a comprehensive view of the mechanisms underlying different degrees of perenniality in different Brassicaceae
#plantscience
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Thanks to TILclimate Podcast for including me in a great episode about the CO2 fertilization effect! climate.mit.edu/podcasts/e1-...

The double life of trichomes: understanding their dual role in herbivory and herbicide resistance Abstract. Understanding the evolutionary forces that maintain phenotypic variation in ecologically relevant traits has long been one of the central goals of evo

New paper from the lab just out in Evolution!

The double life of trichomes: understanding their dual role in herbivory and herbicide resistance

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for…registration for the 3rd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology is open! We hope that you will join us! #Evol2024 @sse-evolution.bsky.social @asn-amnat.bsky.social @eseb.bsky.social

Nice work from my (non-BlueSky) colleague Charlie Harvey on a very important terrestrial carbon sink. Cool combination of field data, remote sensing, and modeling www.nature.com/articles/s41...