Alice Alldredge
American oceanographer and marine biologist
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Early life and education
Alldredge was born in 1949 in Denver, Colorado, USA. She graduated from Merrit Hutton High School in Thornton, Colorado, and completed an undergraduate degree in biology at Carleton College in 1971. Her father was an inspiration to her interest in science and her mother was a role-model as well.
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Career
Alldredge continued her education to earn a PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Davis. Between 1975 and 1976, she studied at the Australian Institute of Marine Science as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1976 and has conducted research on ocean ecology.
Alldredge has conducted research in the open sea, at her laboratory at the University of California, Santa Barbara as well as in collaboration with the Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER) at the Mo'orea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research Site (MCR LTER) in Mo'orea, French Polynesia.
Alldredge discovered the existence of abundant gel particles called Transparent Exopolymer Particles (TEP) and demersal zooplankton, describing their migration and dispersion throughout coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and tidal sandflats. She is an authority on the cycling in the sea of carbon andmarine snow, particles such as algae, bacteria, and debris from the upper ocean that slowly sink to the sea floor as sediments. Through her work on marine snow, Alldredge changed the understanding of particle flux and she made the first quantification of observed sinking rates of marine snow, "showing that marine snow sinks rapidly enough to deliver significant amounts of organic carbon to the deep [sea]". Alice Alldredge also discovered that copepods in the marine food web were using larvacean houses as a primary food source in a pelagic environment. Alldredge is currently researching the source of marine snow, the communities that inhabit it, and snow degredation.
In addition to her teaching and research at UC-Santa Barbara, Alldredge works at the Mo'orea Coral Reef as a researcher with the LTER Study in Mo'orea, French Polynesia studying the currents and forces effecting water transport of the island. In addition to evaluating the biological effect of zooplankton and fish on the reef, scientists are evaluating the biochemical characteristics and differences between waters over the reef and offshore waters. Alldredge has been credited for her role in UC-Santa Barbara's ranking as 7th best university worldwide based on its global scientific impact and collaboration record. She is in the top 0.1% of the ISI Web of Knowledge's highly cited researchers and has remained there since 2003.
Alldredge became the chair of the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UC-Santa Barbara in 2004.
Personal life
Alldredge has three children with her husband, James M. King. She has expressed gratitude for being able to balance family life along with studies and research. Alldredge and her family live in Goleta, California, and in addition to her work, she is a leader of a Buddhist meditation community in the Santa Barbara area.