“Take Five” with Microbial Ecologist Alexandra Worden

"Take Five" is an occasional feature in which we pose five questions to an MBL community member about their career, dreams, and passions. Here we profile Alexandra Worden, senior scientist at the MBL's Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology & Evolution and professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Worden joined the MBL in 2023. Previously, she was a professor at the University of Kiel in Germany where she founded the Ocean EcoSystems Biology Unit. She has held faculty and scientist roles at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Miami. Worden received a B.A. in History from Wellesley College, where she focused on post-colonial African history, and a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Georgia.

Worden will be giving the MBL Friday Evening Lecture on July 26 titled “Going Where The Wild Things Are: Ocean Microbes, Their Interactions, and Ecosystem Consequences.”

When and why did you decide to become a scientist?

I wouldn't say I ever decided to be a scientist. I just kept wanting to answer scientific questions. I’ve always loved nature and I wanted to understand it. I am also very interested in the intersection between society, science, and the environment in the sense that political regimes and decisions have huge impacts for the environment and disease, often through how they've treated indigenous peoples or other populations. 

As an undergraduate majoring in history at a liberal arts college (Wellesley), I also had a concentration in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences performed at MIT. I did my first field work as a junior in high school through an Earthwatch scholarship, and started working in a marine laboratory at MIT in the summer after freshman year. I always feel that it is a bit misleading to say I was a history major in college, because it leaves out a lot of the picture.

What question most interests and inspires you to come to the lab (or field) for research?

I really want to understand the fate of carbon dioxide that is taken up from the atmosphere by organisms in the sea. This is done primarily by organisms that are too small to see and impossible to track using traditional approaches. The movement of carbon through the marine ecosystem is still largely unknown, although of course we know it moves through biological processes. These are the mysteries I want to solve and understand: how the base of the marine food chain “works” and what ends up making it to the deep sea versus fueling surface ocean food chains; and how the microbial communities that are responsible for these activities will change with the extreme pressure we're putting on the environment today.

If you could invite two specialists in your field (living or dead) to dinner, who would you choose, and what would you talk about?

I would love to sit with Natalia Kanem. She is the head of the United Nations Population Fund. She's a doctor who also has a background in epidemiology, and  is now trying to guide the U.N. in making sure people have reproductive rights globally and are gender safe. I would also invite Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the first person to see bacteria and protists through a microscope. We now recognize microbes are dominant and critical – in our own guts and in the oceans and soil – but he was the first person to lay eyes upon them! …to physically observe them through the fabulous lenses he built in the 1600s.

What would we talk about? Well, I am very interested in epidemiology (as applied to all living creatures). We think about COVID a lot now because it has had such a big impact globally. We have to realize that as we shift microbial communities, even just little bits, new relationships can arise between community members that may or may not benefit our “living” environment, similar to how things transpired with the COVID virus. So I would love to talk with someone who has thought so much about epidemiology and human populations, with a lot of empathy and concern for underrepresented voices, and to someone who had those first insights that the microbial side of the world even exists. It would be interesting to hear their thoughts on the shifts we will encounter under future climates.

What impact has your affiliation with MBL had on your career or life? 

I used to be all about mechanisms. I just needed to understand how things work. Then I realized you can't understand the mechanism without understanding how it got there. MBL is a place that wants to understand mechanisms and the evolutionary process that underpins developmental processes, as well as how organisms and ecosystems will change in the future. It i's a bit of a different emphasis than classical oceanography and involves embracing the long history of our planet!

I love that many of the students coming through the MBL hold the possibility to be authentic mentors for a much wider population than we currently have in academia. I aim to foster a future academic world that has mentors who really represent the student bodies that they teach, and who provide models in which people can see themselves. I think MBL does amazing work in this area, and I'm really excited to be joining a community where that is a top priority.

One of the things we all need, whether we are in an underrepresented group or not, is to have a network that can empathize with what we are experiencing.That hasn’t always been true in science, for women and for other groups. I think the best way to accomplish this is through building close cohorts that come together year after year, whether at the end of high school, through early college or throughout college. I would really like to develop a course “of return” where individuals are resident at MBL for a period of time that fits with their other academic work, and return as a group for shorter periods as they advance through their studies. So they can build that cohort while also learning the scientific topics that we are teaching.

Outside of your work, what are your passions?

I love the ocean, but I suppose that falls under the work category, too. My two kids are a super important part of my life, as is my partner who has worked with me to juggle our two careers (and later family) since we met, when I was still in my PhD program! We have a considerable number of pets — menagerie is a fair term – and I also love hiking. I have quite a bit of interest in how we recognize and preserve history or herstory, and honor the efforts of lives past.