The Chattanooga Times Free Press interviewed Aimee Classen, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who has received more than $880,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate often-overlooked carbon cycle players. Classen and her team will examine factors that influence carbon cycling below the ground and are not included in today’s carbon-cycle models. They are looking for what happens to carbon in soil and particularly what things that live in soil, such as fungi and bacteria, do with it.”It’s clear that these little microbes have a huge impact on carbon in soils. People just haven’t studied them because they are hard to look at,” Classen said.