She graduated from Merrit Hutton High School in Thornton, Colorado, and completed an undergraduate degree in biology at Carleton College in 1971.
[1] She is an authority on marine snow,[4] the particles which settle to the bottom of the oceans, and the cycling in the sea of carbon.
[5] 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.
[3] In 1990, Alldredge was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,[3] in 1992 she won the Henry Bryant Bigelow Medal from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,[7] 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.