On November 5, WINGS will induct four new Fellows during our 2026 Women of Discovery celebration in New York City. In a special Q&A series, we are sharing a little bit about each honoree. Dr. Alison Criscitiello is a world-renowned ice core scientist, glaciologist, advocate for gender equity, mother, and professional high-altitude mountaineer. She explores the history of climate and glaciers in polar and high-alpine regions by tracking environmental contaminant histories using ice core chemistry. Her work has taken her to ice caps around the world including Antarctica, Greenland, and the Canadian High Arctic, not to mention the summit of Canada’s highest peak, Mount Logan. Many of the glaciers she has visited are at extreme risk due to climate change. Dr. Criscitiello is at the forefront of data capture and documentation of ice loss in these volatile zones.
Tell us your story. How did you get involved in science and your field specifically?
Growing up outside Boston, I spent a lot of time getting lost in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with my twin sister, Ra. Our parents gave us an unusual amount of freedom for our age; by twelve, we were completing winter traverses like the Presidential Traverse together. Those early adventures, combined with skiing and ice climbing from a young age, planted in me a deep and grounding love of winter, mountains, and wild places. I worked for years as a US climbing ranger for the National Park Service in Washington state, and then as a mountain guide on Denali and Aconcagua. I loved the physical side of that life, but I found myself wanting to understand these places that came to feel like home, not just move through them. I went to Wesleyan, studied earth and environmental science, and walked away with something that has served me every day since: how to think and ask big questions. From there I found my way eventually to the exact kind of science that allowed me to bring all these skillsets together. It took time, and for much of it I didn’t see anyone who looked like me doing the kind of work I wanted to do. I went on to earn the first PhD in glaciology MIT ever conferred, a major which I petitioned for and has also served me every day since by teaching me how to answer those big questions. The throughline for me has always been the same: I fell in love with winter, winter sports, and mountains at a young age, and I wanted to understand that world. Ice cores are how I do that now, drilling on top of the world’s highest mountains or in the high Arctic to recover new climate histories. The science and the exploration, the mental and physical effort, are intertwined.
What is something you would like people to understand about your field and work?
Ice cores are not projections or models. They are direct physical records. When we drill into a glacier or ice cap, we are retrieving the actual atmosphere from thousands of years ago: the gases, the chemistry, the ash from volcanic eruptions, the fingerprints of wildfires, the traces of pesticides. It’s a frozen archive of everything that has fallen from the sky. What that archive shows us is remarkable in two ways. First, it gives us a long-term baseline for natural climate variability. Second, it shows us, unmistakably, the human imprint. When I look at snow falling on some of the most remote, seemingly untouched places on Earth – the ice caps of Ellesmere Island, the summit of Mount Logan – that snow carries with it chemical fingerprints from sources very far away. There is no pristine. Human activity has reached everywhere. The other thing worth impressing is the simple connection to water. These masses of ice are not just beautiful or scientifically intriguing, they are water towers. They supply headwaters for rivers that millions of people depend on. When ice melts, it doesn’t just disappear; it releases whatever has been locked inside it, including legacy contaminants like DDT that were deposited decades ago. Understanding what’s sitting in that snowpack, and what’s coming down stream, is directly relevant to the people living below it. This kind of work feels particularly urgent, as the longer we wait, the more records are lost to melt.
What are the greatest barriers to more women working in science?
The most fundamental barrier is not seeing yourself reflected in the field. That absence matters more than people realize; it’s hard to imagine yourself in a space you’ve never seen occupied by someone like you. I made one of the most consequential decisions of my career, choosing my PhD advisor, largely based on whether I would be safe as a queer woman in that environment. That shouldn’t be a factor, but it was. It still is for many people.
There’s also the more immediate, daily barrier of having your competence questioned. I spent years as a mountain guide where clients would size me up and immediately doubt whether I could do the job, simply because I’m a small woman. That kind of constant friction, of having to prove yourself before you’ve even gotten to work, can erode confidence. And confidence is something girls are already being socialized out of long before they reach graduate school.
This is a big part of why Girls on Ice Canada exists (and why WINGS Fellow Erin Pettit founded the original US-based Girls on Ice program). The program is explicitly half-driven by science and half-driven by building self-confidence and self-efficacy in a challenging environment. Whether the participants go on to become scientists or not is almost beside the point. It’s about helping them understand that these spaces belong to them.
The other thing I’d name is privilege. I’m white and I grew up in a middle-class suburb of Boston with parents who encouraged independence. A lot of things had to line up for me to end up where I am. When I think about who is still being left out – First Nations youth, gender diverse youth, young people from rural and marginalized communities – those gaps aren’t about ability or ambition. They’re about access. And they’re solvable.
What gets you up in the morning?
My daughters. That answer has surprised me a little, because for most of my career it was the ice and the mountains and the questions I had about them changing. The pull toward extreme places, toward work that tests every skill I have at once. I used to spend half the year in the field, and that was what kept me engaged through the meticulous lab work and paper writing in between. But something shifted when I became a parent. I go into the field nearly as much as I used to, but now I often have to push myself to leave (or rather, my wife gently helps me leave). This is something I never thought I’d say. My daughters, Winter and Juniper, have made the work feel more personal and more urgent. This is the world they are going to inherit.
In my position, I hear a lot of climate anxiety and despair. And I understand it; the records we reconstruct from ice cores make the stakes very clear. But I find myself increasingly driven by the opposite impulse. This is not the time to feel defeated; this is the time to act. The ice we’re losing is irreplaceable. The records we can still collect are a finite resource. That urgency is actually energizing to me, not paralyzing.
And then there’s the cold. It is also part of what gets me up. There is something about extreme environments where nothing is comfortable, where your world is reduced to the most basic survivalist needs, that I seem to crave. It forces a kind of clarity and simplicity that I find hard to find anywhere else.
What’s your next challenge?
Drilling on SE Dome in Greenland in Spring 2027, and hopeful surface to bedrock ice core drilling on the Columbia Icefield, northern Ellesmere Island, and in the Karakoram after that. More immediately, the next challenge is the one we are in the middle of: analyzing the shallow ice cores we drilled in Spring 2025 on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut, to reconstruct environmental contaminant histories.
Describe yourself in three words.
Driven. Curious. Relentless.
Links:
https://www.ualberta.ca/en/science/news/2025/november/summit-of-excellence.html
https://www.ualberta.ca/en/science/research-and-teaching/research/ice-core-archive/index.html
https://www.inspiringgirls.org/alison-criscitiello
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hSOd7TMAAAAJ&hl=en