The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, chartered in 1780, was established to recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in addressing the greatest challenges facing the young republic. The first members elected to the Academy include George Washington, who said—in his first annual message to Congress in 1790—“Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” The Academy continues to convene leaders from multiple fields to examine new ideas, and address issues of importance to the nation and the world.Alice Alldredge earned her PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Davis. Soon after, she studied at the Australian Institute of Marine Science as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow, and then joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1976.

Alice Alldredge, a graduate of Carleton College, Minnesota, was a key leader in the development of Marine Science at UCSB and served as the Chair of the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology. She led the development of the UC Santa Barbara Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Marine Science (IGPMS) in 1995, and was its first Chair until 2004. In 1996, she was honored with a Distinguished Teaching Award for Science from UC Santa Barbara. 

Alldredge is a recipient of the Henry Bryant Bigelow Gold Medal from Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution and the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award from the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Carleton College Alumni Association.

Alice Alldredge is largely known for her discoveries related to the origins, composition, dynamics and vertical transport of aggregates of organic material, often referred to as marine snow. Marine snow, fragile organic aggregates larger than 0.5 mm, sink rapidly into the deep ocean and their transport to depth is a critical component of the ocean's biological carbon pump. Alldredge's work on marine snow came from both novel field observations supplemented by detailed laboratory analyses. In particular, she conducted many hundreds of open-ocean scuba dives in the North Atlantic and Pacific to collect and observe marine snow dynamics in situ. Her work led to an understanding of the importance of marine snow to sinking particle fluxes and ocean carbon budgets.  She and her students and collaborators made the first observations of the composition, architecture, and in situ sinking rates, of marine snow and elucidated the processes of its formation and destruction, and its interactions with microbes and zooplankton. Her early work focused on the role of Appendicularian houses as sources of marine snow. She is also credited with discovering a new class of abundant sticky gel particles in the ocean known as Transparent Exopolymer Particles (TEP) that serve as the “glue” holding marine snow aggregates together. The biological carbon pump delivers roughly 10 pentagrams (1 Pg = 10¹⁵ g) of organic carbon to the deep ocean and sediments each year where it is sequestered from the surface ocean for months to millennia. As such, it is a significant component of the planet’s carbon cycle and thereby climate. Yet, before Alice Alldredge’s work, the importance of marine snow was largely unknown. Today, there is a resurgence of interest in Alice's research on marine snow as investigators around the world are working to improve the representation of biological processes in Earth System Models in order to make better predictions of ocean carbon cycling and the Earth's climate. 

Professor Alldredge also studied the role of zooplankton in coral reef food webs, and the migration patterns of demersal zooplankton on coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and tidal sandflats.  She was an associate investigator with MSI’s Moorea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) study in French Polynesia for 18 years