14 Facts About Alexandra Worden

Alexandra Worden started her laboratory in 2004 as Assistant Professor at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science in Miami, Florida.

Alexandra Worden is a Senior Scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago which are affiliates.

In 2009, Alexandra Worden was named a scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, later becoming a senior fellow of CIFAR.

Alexandra Worden was selected from an international pool of leading scientists as a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Marine Investigator in 2013, an award given for her "creativity, innovation, and potential to make major, new breakthroughs".

In 2015 and 2016 Alexandra Worden was a Fellow in Marine and Climate Science at the HWK in Germany.

Alexandra Worden is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the honorific leadership group of the American Society for Microbiology, elected in 2016.

Alexandra Worden is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, elected in 2022.

Alexandra Worden is a Fellow of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, elected in 2024.

Alexandra Worden's research focuses on the physiology and ecology of eukaryotic phytoplankton and their roles in the carbon cycle.

Alexandra Worden initiated this research through an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology and expanded it thereafter by adapting multiple molecular and omic methods to characterize the evolution and ecological contributions of these photosynthetic plankton, which are now known to be major ocean primary producers.

Alexandra Worden helped pioneer "targeted metagenomics" wherein cells of particular interest are separated from the masses using flow cytometry and genomes are then sequenced from only the cells of greatest interest.

Alexandra Worden developed this innovative technique for analyzing individual protist cells in their natural oceanic environment, thereby bypassing the need to transport samples back to laboratory settings, preventing the potential alterations or loss of biodiversity that often occur during sample handling and storage.

Alexandra Worden's laboratory investigates ancestral components of land plants, evolutionary biology and distributions of uncultured taxa and interactions between viruses and phytoplankton host cells.

Alexandra Worden publishes in the fields of environmental microbiology, evolutionary biology, genome science and oceanography.