Growing up in Waverly, Tennessee, Gage Coon spent much of his childhood outside. His family had everything from chickens to horses and even an emu named Big Bird. Coon and his cousins would explore the woods surrounding their home, and his father, a mechanic, taught him how to build and repair things around the house. His mother, a secretary at the local high school’s vocational school who loves gardening and birdwatching, encouraged him to experience as much of the world around him as he could.
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.
The transition from rural Tennessee to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and MIT has been a significant one. As a first-generation student, he did not learn about PhD programs until several years into college.
Once he discovered academic research, however, Coon was drawn to the possibility of spending his career learning.
“I discovered this world of academia, and so I was really excited when I learned about it,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, constant learning. That is exactly what I want to do forever.’”
Coon began studying the microbes that drive carbon and sulfur cycling in marine sediments as an undergraduate, eventually joining research cruises to investigate these processes firsthand.
His first research cruise, in 2022 after his second year of college, took him to the Atlantic continental slope to study methane seeps and how microbes prevent this methane from escaping to our atmosphere. For Coon, experiencing the ocean up close changed the way he understood the microscopic organisms he was studying.
“It is very powerful seeing yourself in the middle of the ocean, with a whole other world of complex life beneath you,” he says.
At MIT, working with his advisor Tanja Bosak, a professor of geobiology, Coon has continued studying microbial carbon and sulfur cycling, but with a greater emphasis on the applications. One of his major projects explores how microbes could be used to reduce methane emissions from wastewater treatment.
When wastewater is treated, microbes break down organic material in large tanks called anaerobic digesters. One of the final products of this process is the powerful greenhouse gas methane. However, Coon and his colleagues found a way to change what the microbes produce by adding gypsum, a waste product that is created from fertilizer manufacturing
The system uses the added gypsum to turn the methane into carbonate, which can be used to make cement, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. The process also produces elemental sulfur, necessary for global fertilizer production, which is currently sources from oil and gas refinement. The approach effectively turns two waste products, sewage and waste gypsum, into useful materials while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
For Coon, the possibility of creating a system that is both environmentally beneficial and economically useful is central to the project. Now that the laboratory experiments have ended, the researchers are looking toward conducting pilot-scale testing. Coon and his advisors have been communicating with companies interested in adapting the system to larger facilities, and hope the technology can eventually move beyond the laboratory.
“If enough small places start doing their pilot-scale studies, then hopefully you could convince some place like Boston or another big city to do this and really make a contribution to our global goal to decrease emissions on the gigaton scale,” he says.
The wastewater project is only one part of Coon’s PhD research. He also studies geological processes that could produce molecular hydrogen, a potential carbon-free energy source. His work examines how iron-rich rocks break down and generate hydrogen underground. He is continuing his thesis work by focusing on microbial competition for acetate, and what this means for global methane emissions from coastal wetlands. This work could improve future climate predictions and support engineered mitigation efforts to decrease emissions from these wetlands.
Across these projects, Coon is interested in the connection between the microscopic and the massive. But Coon’s PhD has also given him an opportunity to think about science beyond his own research.
One of the parts of graduate school he has enjoyed most is mentoring younger researchers. He has worked with a handful of students through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and from Tufts University, teaching them laboratory techniques and experimental geobiology.
Outside the lab, Coon maintains some of the same connection to the natural world that characterized his childhood in Tennessee. He spends time hiking to explore local geology, playing bluegrass guitar, and speed-solving Rubik’s Cubes.
Looking ahead, Coon sees himself continuing in academia, working in government, or helping to bring environmental technologies into practice.
What matters most, he says, is continuing to produce knowledge that can help people understand and potentially improve the world around them.
“I do think, no matter what,” he says, “I’ll be somewhere thinking about how microscopic life connects to the global ecosystem and carbon emissions.”
de MIT News https://ift.tt/9r8TPyw
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