Dirk was a well-known expert in abiotic stress research in plants. His current research concerned the investigation of natural genetic diversity for molecular mechanisms of cold, heat, high night temperature and drought stress tolerance in Arabidopsis, potato and rice, the identification of molecular signatures of plant stress memory, integrated omics approaches for the identification of stress tolerance markers and the exploitation of the rice transcriptome for gene discovery. His research was driven by a fusion of experimental work in molecular biology, genomics and quantitative genetic with bioinformatics and computation.