April 14, 2026
Congratulations to Alexandra Worden, professor of Geophysical Sciences and senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, who has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She joins a group of distinguished artists, scientists, and scholars in the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows honored for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”
Worden’s research focuses on the fate and transport of carbon in the oceans—with an emphasis on the photosynthetic microbes that live in the sunlit surface ocean and form the base of marine food chains.
Her group develops methods and technologies for sea-going studies of bacteria, protists, and viruses, and for quantifying their contributions to global primary production, cell-to-cell interactions, and trajectories in future oceans. In addition to pioneering methods for targeting uncultivated microbes in the ocean, her lab has focused on developing methods for investigating environmentally relevant algae in culture under climate change simulations, as well as methods for genetic manipulation of these species.
With the Fellowship, Worden will pursue understanding of how deep ocean microbes respond to photosynthetic algae that sink to the seafloor—“a process that results in the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but with poorly understood impacts on community transitions in the vast dark ocean,” she said.