Hi I’m Jie Yun, a final year graduate student in Dave Des Marais Lab in Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. My research focuses on understanding how plants respond to drought stress, especially how different genotypes or species respond to drought differently through the understanding of their gene regulation networks. The goal is to understand how environmental factors shape plant populations and communities, with a focus on how this happened in the past and how they could evolve in the future. I plan to graduate this December and I’m currently in job market!

PhD thesis

Systems Analysis of Plant Responses to Dehydration:

1. Understanding genotype by environment effects of gene regulation network between two genotypes in Brachypodium distachyon under soil dry-down stress
2. Study of gene regulation of carbon allocation strategy under drought at grain filling stage between two species (perennial and annual) in Brachypodium
3. The comparison of leaf elongation of eight species in Pooideae family affected under drought, including the domesticated and wild species of barley, oat and wheat, and Brachypodium

My background and history

My interests of research formed in a path which originated in water treatment study and ended in the plant and environment interaction.

Driven by my passion to protect environment from my personal experience, I studied Water supply and wastewater treatment (a typical major of Environmental Engineering in China) in Shenyang Jianzhu University in China in undergraduate.

After graduation, I went to Carnegie Mellon University as a master’s student in Civil and Environmental Engineering. In one independent study with Prof. Greg Lowry, I found out plants are widely used for phytoremediation to remove/fix chemicals in the environment. I realized plants are playing important roles in the environment. Plants are in turn, facing environmental problems. It is especially interesting to me that as “passive receptors”, they adapt to environmental changes, toxics, and survive under environmental stresses.

I came to MIT under the supervision of Prof. Dave Des Marais to understand more about plant and environment interaction. Here from a totally different perspective, I start to think how a plant is responding to the various environments, by the regulation of its responses to stress and growth. Different from avoiding, uptaking or fixing chemicals, now I think about its interactive relationship with water or CO₂, the essential building blocks for plants. As water is one of the most crucial resources for living but is facing depletion, and its biggest usage is irrigation in agriculture, making plants grow with less water is one way to solve the environmental problem. At the same time, this is also very important for food security in areas without irrigation facility or experiencing extreme weathers which would be more common in coming decades. Thus far, after a long path on this road, there are still many aspects that are waiting me to discover.

The similar training I am receiving can be applied for plant interaction with various environmental stress, especially those largely affected by climate change.

Another dimension of my study is to think about how this environment interact have evolved in the past that shaped plants’ diversity in populations and communities and can evolve in the future climate. One application is to understand domestication process and think about how to improve crop resistent to environmental stress. Another application is to understand the diversity of plants in nature and how to conserve biodiversity in the future climate.

My goal is to keep doing research at this cutting edge between plant and environment, and at the same time, try to translate the latest scientific findings into application to help improve both environment and food safety/security, and protecting biodiversity of plants in the nature.