Dave Des Marais receives 2025 Samuel M. Seegal Prize

Dave Des Marais, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), is the recipient of this year’s Samuel M. Seegal Prize.

Professor Des Marais heads the Des Marais Lab, which focuses on understanding the mechanisms of plant-environment interaction. Lab members use tools from molecular, quantitative, and population genetics to identify the physiological basis of plant response to environmental cues and ask how these mechanisms constrain or facilitate plant breeding and evolutionary change.

Des Marais teaches a variety of courses, including 7.014: Introductory Biology, advanced undergraduate classes, and a graduate seminar. Although the skill levels and material in each course are remarkably different, Des Marais has created a common thread in his overall approach to teaching.

“I develop a narrative that allows students, first, to learn fundamental science concepts and then, second, connect those fundamentals to other concepts or to real-world challenges,” he said.

Des Marais’s love of making connections among topics and how they relate to the world stems from his time as a student in college and through graduate school.

“Applying math to biological processes, or chemistry to environmental change, or environmental life science to human health is an incredibly satisfying way to learn about the world and our place in it,” he said when discussing what inspired him as a student.

One of Des Marais’s favorite classes to teach has been 1.091: Traveling Research Environmental eXperience (TREX), which he has taught for the past five years. TREX is a field class centered around studying environmental problems, in which students apply their analytical and lab skills from earlier classes to real data they generate in the field.

“My favorite teaching opportunities are those in which I help students use their knowledge and experiences to tackle challenging problems,” Des Marais said. “I love watching students put all of the pieces together: studying a problem, collecting data in partnership with stakeholders, analyzing the data, and then presenting solutions to the community.”

Des Marais has received numerous awards and honors over the course of his career, including the 2022 MIT CEE Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award, which recognizes the most outstanding faculty instructor in the past academic year, and a 2023 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), its most prestigious honor for junior faculty members.

“Being recognized by my peers for excellence in teaching is a fantastic feeling,” Des Marais said. “I was so inspired by my own teachers, mentors, advisors, and colleagues that it feels like I’m being recognized for paying that back to the next generation. The idea that one of my students might themselves one day inspire the next generation of scholars is just about the most powerful feeling I can imagine.”