McRose awarded Packard fellowship

Darcy McRose, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently earned a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. This fellowship, given by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, honors scientists and engineers who show outstanding creativity and potential in their work. The award is named for David Packard, an American electrical engineer who established the foundation to support innovative research. McRose will receive $875,000 in research funding over five years.

Darcy McRose

McRose’s lab uses bacterial physiology, genetics, genomics and mass spectrometry to study how microbes use secondary metabolites to navigate and interact with their environment. She has won many awards, including the L’Oréal for Women in Science Postdoc Fellowship and the Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award at MIT, and was named a Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in Earth System Science in 2025.

“Science is a powerful tool for solving the world’s toughest challenges,” Nancy Lindborg, president and CEO of the Packard Foundation, said. “These visionary Packard Fellows are pushing the boundaries of knowledge, and their bold ideas will become tomorrow’s real-world solutions.”