Dr. John de la Parra is an ethnobotanist and plant chemist with expertise in medicinal plants and food crops. He grew up on a small farm in rural Alabama, with his family originating in México and South America. His grandmother’s early teachings on plants inspired him to work with indigenous populations to understand how phenotypic selection influences healthful plant chemistry and food choice.
John received his PhD in Chemistry from Northeastern University and has additional certifications in horticulture, botanical authentication, and modern chromatographic techniques. He is an Associate of the Harvard University Herbaria where he regularly delivers lectures and has redeveloped the course “Plants and Human Affairs”, which has been taught at Harvard since 1876 and represents the oldest course in the United States focused on plants and their uses. John has held appointments as a Lecturer at both Tufts University (teaching plant science and fieldwork classes) and Northeastern University (teaching agricultural biotechnology) and he previously served as a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab where he studied chemotypic variability in food plants.