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Growing up in Waverly, Tennessee, Gage Coon spent much of his childhood outside.

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That hands-on upbringing, which taught Coon to appreciate the natural world and the processes that sustain it, continues to influence how he approaches science today.

Now entering his third year as a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Coon studies some of the smallest organisms on Earth: microbes. His research focuses on how microorganisms cycle carbon and sulfur through the environment and how to leverage those processes to help address climate change. Though he studies organisms too small to see with the naked eye, the experimental nature of his work — whether in the lab or on a research vessel in the open ocean — is especially satisfying.

“I think I enjoy that physicality of seeing what I’m working with, seeing its change, and being able to touch it,” Coon says.

Coon did not initially set out to study microbiology. His interest in science began with chemistry. A high school chemistry teacher and a summer program introduced him to the subject. But later, at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, he joined a lab focused on microbial biogeochemistry and was delighted to find a field that brought together the different areas that interested him: chemistry, the environment, and the larger climate processes shaping our Earth.