I’m a third-year Ph.D. student in the Environmental Science department at the University of Arizona. My dissertation research focuses on late Quaternary soil-landscape evolution in the Sonoran Desert with an emphasis on better understanding how desert landscape dynamics and paleoclimate influenced land-use decisions and subsistence strategies employed by pre-European contact indigenous peoples.  My NASA Space Grant project involves teaching students at Tucson High Magnet School about the importance of soils and soil processes in the global carbon cycle. This project will use in-classroom lab experimentation coupled with the field study of soils at the university agricultural experiment station. The soil experiments will use easy-to-find, low-cost materials and the experimental methods will be designed, at least in part, by the students themselves. The students will also have the option to collect and analyze their own soils. The overarching goal of the project is to get students thinking about the complex natural world that exists under their feet and to inspire an appreciation for what the average person simply refers to as “dirt”.