United Fresh 2019

John de la Parra, Ph.D
Research Lead, Open Agriculture Inititative
MIT Media Lab


Dr. John de la Parra is an ethnobotanist and plant chemist with expertise in food crops and medicinal plants. He is the Research Lead at the MIT Media Lab’s Open Agriculture Initiative where his work focuses on how environmental variation and human selection influence the search for medicinal compounds, flavor, nutrition, and other high-value chemistry. As part of that work, he manages the National Produce Chemotyping Project which catalogs the chemical variation of produce throughout the country. He holds additional appointments as an Associate researcher at Harvard University, as a Lecturer of Environmental Studies at Tufts University, and a Lecturer of Biotechnology at Northeastern University.

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