Alyson Santoro is a microbial oceanographer and Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on microbes involved in nutrient cycling in the ocean, especially of the element nitrogen. She is interested in cultivating new microbes and discovering novel ways of tracking their activity. Her research combines laboratory experiments with field observations, and to-date has used genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and stable isotope geochemistry as tools to uncover the activity of microbes in the mesopelagic ocean. A particular focus of her lab is the marine archaea, a largely uncultured group of microbes.
Alyson received her undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College, and her MS and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (ASM) and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO). She has spent over a year of her life at sea and is the recipient of the Sloan Foundation Early Career award and a Simons Foundation Investigator Award in Aquatic Microbial Ecology.
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