In this episode I talk to David Des Marais, Assistant Professor at MIT in Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research interests are plant ecology and evolution, physiology, functional genomics, sustainable agriculture, plant-water relations. His lab seeks to understand the mechanisms of plant-environment interaction. Using tools from molecular, quantitative, and population genetics, the lab strives to identify the physiological basis of plant response to environmental cues, and ask how these mechanisms constrain or facilitate plant breeding and evolutionary change.