Alice Alpert
Alice Alpert grew up hiking in the mountains of California, but it wasn’t until her undergraduate studies at Brown University that she realized she could actually get paid to study the Earth. Paleoceanography hooked her right away with its seemingly magical translation of chemical quantities in sediments into information about the environment in the past. After graduation, she worked as a research technician at Palmer Station, Antarctica, where she observed and and documented some of the most rapid climate change on Earth. In her graduate studies with her Ph.D. advisors, WHOI scientists Anne Cohen and Delia Oppo, Alpert has combined her fascination with paleoceanography with her desire to investigate recent and current climate change. She loves the dynamic combination of chemistry, biology, geology, and physical oceanography in her work. When not SCUBA diving for corals or pulverizing them with a dental drill, she loves cooking for large dinner parties, biking the back roads of Cape Cod, tromping in the woods, and wrapping it all up with a beach bonfire. Her mentor for this article was Samir Patel, senior editor and writer at Archaeology magazine and adjuct faculty member at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
