About
Dr. Aimée Classen is the director of the University of Michigan’s Biological Station and a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. As director, she provides leadership for 13,000-acre campus and facility that aims to leverage over a century of research and transformative experiences to drive discoveries and solutions to benefit Michigan and beyond.
Classen is an ecosystem ecologist and global change biologist. Her work focuses on the connections among plants, soils, and the atmosphere. Work in the Classen lab explores questions across scales, from the root-microbe interface to mountains around the world, to better understand how warming, altered interactions among species, and shifts in biodiversity influence carbon feedbacks to the atmosphere.
Her career includes roles such as Editor-in-Chief of Ecological Monographs, a leading journal in ecology, membership on national and international boards, and professorial positions at the University of Vermont, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Tennessee, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She holds a Ph.D. in Biology from Northern Arizona University and a B.A. in Biology from Smith College.
Recognized for her significant contributions, she has been elected a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Ecological Society of America, and has been honored as a promising young scholar by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Fields of study
Ecosystem ecology, global change, nutreint and carbon cycling, plant-soil interactions, biodiversity
Graduate students
Brenda Hernandez; Aadia Moseley-McCloud; Olivia Vought
Research team
Karin Rand (lab manager); Isabel Thornberry (resaerch tech)
