Alice L. Alldredge

Alice Louise Alldredge (February 1, 1949) is an American oceanographer and marine biologist who studies marine snow, carbon cycling, microbes and plankton in the ecology of the ocean. She has been one of the most cited scientific researchers since 2003.

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) She is an authority on marine snow, the particles which settle to the bottom of the oceans, and the cycling in the sea of carbon. 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. and in 1995, she was awarded the first chair of UC-Santa Barbara's graduate program in Marine Science, which she held until 2004 and was awarded $5,000. In 1996, she was honored with a Distinguished Teaching Award for Sciences from UC-Santa Barbara, and in 1998 was selected as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

In 2008, she was awarded the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award from the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography

Selected Publications

Characteristics, dynamics and significance of marine snow. Alice L Alldredge and Mary W Silver. 1988. Progress in Oceanography. Intense hydrolytic enzyme activity on marine aggregates and implications for rapid particle dissolution. David C Smith, Meinhard Simon, Alice L Alldredge, and Farooq Azam. 1992. Nature. Phylogenetic diversity of aggregate-attached vs. free-living marine bacterial assemblages. Edward F DeLong, Diana G Franks and Alice L Alldredge. 1993. Limnology and Oceanography. The abundance and significance of a class of large, transparent organic particles in the ocean. Alice L Alldredge, Uta Passow and Bruce E Logan. 1993. Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers. The oceanic gel phase: a bridge in the DOM–POM continuum. Pedro Verdugo, Alice L Alldredge, Farooq Azam, David L Kirchman, Uta Passow, Peter H Santschi. 2004. Marine Chemistry.

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.