TalentView: Alexandra Leeper, Iceland Ocean Cluster

“All of my work from the very beginning has been focused on the way humans interact with the ocean. How can we do it better? How can we do it more sustainably? That’s been the red thread running through my career,” says Dr Alexandra Leeper, speaking to WeAreAquaculture from her office in Reykjavík.  

The Iceland Ocean Cluster CEO and lifelong marine diving enthusiast, who holds a PhD in aquaculture and describes herself as “passionate about sustainability, education and innovation in the blue economy”, acts as an advisor for the newly-founded Iceland Eco-Business Park, is global ecosystems leader at venture capital firm Blue Nova Ventures, teaches at the Icelandic College of Fisheries, and is even embarking on her own startup.  

“Iceland’s a small country, so we all wear a lot of hats,” she laughs. 

“I spend most of my time thinking about where we have common ground across all the different ecosystems. Where might be interesting to collaborate? It's essential to sit down and talk with people, getting to know them on a personal and professional level so we can work better together.” 

Originally from the UK, Alexandra began her career studying marine biology and oceanography at Plymouth University. This included a year in Singapore working in an environmental consultancy, focusing on a problem that still preoccupies her today: understanding human impacts on marine ecosystems, in this case how coastal defence projects alter local biology and oceanography. 

Another early professional experience was offshore as a navigator in the seismic sector in Brazil and West Africa. It was, she recalls, “very eye opening and quite fascinating”, not least because it revealed the scale at which humans operate at sea. “While I was out there, I also saw a lot of fishing equipment floating in the open ocean, ghost fishing gear. And it got me thinking about my studies on food security and the health of marine ecosystems - the link between how we seek energy and how we seek food started rattling around in my mind.” 

She decided to pursue an Erasmus Mundus Masters in marine environment and resources, deliberately choosing a programme that would give her experience across a variety of European countries. After stints in Southampton, Bilbao, and Belgium, the last stop was Reykjavík, where she ultimately decided to stay to pursue an industrial PhD focusing on aquaculture and the circular economy, with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and Icelandic food and biotech research institute Matis. 

“I fell in love with the country a little bit. I’d been moving around a lot, and I thought, it's time to unpack. Iceland has a really interesting innovation culture; I liked how people were working here.” 

“I found myself looking more and more at how we can produce blue food in a more sustainable way. How can we do it better? With aquaculture, we have control over production, but there's still a lot of challenges with farming fish. How can we really optimize? What do we feed them? Can we find more circular sources of food, and then what's the impact on the production of those fish and the gut microbiome, the behaviour, the welfare? How can we eliminate waste and create value for another industry – and make that industry better at the same time?” 

“That was the thread that took me to the Iceland Ocean cluster,” she explains. “We should not be wasting any of the precious resources that we catch and farm.” 

The Iceland Ocean Cluster was founded in 2011 by entrepreneur Thor Sigfusson with the aim of bringing companies into conversation with each other and with innovators, attempting to bridge silos and avoid duplicated effort. Part of that philosophy of making the most of limited resources translated into the 100% Fish movement, not just a hashtag slogan but a zero-waste practical philosophy applied to real companies and operations – which Alexandra found a perfect fit when she joined the cluster almost five years ago. 

At its simplest, this represents a commitment to using every part of the fish, whether cultivated or wild-caught, turning side streams into valuable products rather than letting them go to waste. “We work across the entire blue economy, but we always refer to 100% Fish as our flagship program – it’s really a core part of the Cluster’s DNA,” she says. 

In Iceland, Alexandra explains, this circular approach is already reshaping the seafood industry – a crucial chunk of the island nation’s economy. And, with severe cuts to quotas in many wild fisheries globally, she says, relying on volume is no longer a workable business strategy. “We cannot drive business successfully just on volume. We really have to diversify revenue streams. We can’t afford to waste anything,” she says.  

A similar logic applies to aquaculture, particularly land-based systems, where CAPEX costs are high. If a company is investing heavily in production, she argues, it makes little sense to discard material that could become a secondary revenue stream. 

She highlights a recent Nordic Innovation-funded IOC project with Royal Greenland, which had been looking for a higher-value use for its shrimp shells but struggled to identify an option that fit the company’s brand and commercial strategy. As Alexandra explains, they had produced shrimp meal in the past, but this did not match well with their portfolio of retail products. The challenge was finding a “brand aligned business case” that could generate real profits rather than simply avoiding waste.

The Iceland Ocean Cluster helped bridge this gap by working with the company to develop a new approach that turns the shells into a premium ingredient with broader market potential. This project is now helping convert a facility in Ilulissat, Greenland, to dry and mill shells to a specification needed by companies like Primex, an Icelandic startup producing chitosan for cosmetics and other industrial uses. 

“Not only do we reduce the environmental impact, we create value. It makes business sense,” she says. “And to me that’s the way to make sure business changes, by making sure that we speak that language.” 

“It has to be environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable, otherwise it won’t stick. And if big businesses don’t do it, then those big changes don’t happen.” 

Now the Iceland Ocean Cluster is working to ensure this philosophy is communicated globally. In the five years since Alexandra joined, the Cluster has grown to an eight-person team, with sister organisations in 12 countries. “This kind of work tends to attract entrepreneurial minds,” she smiles. “A thousand ideas all the time, everywhere, everything all at once.”  

Current projects – and there are many – include a "100% Great Lakes Fish" initiative in the US, a “100% Hake” project in Namibia, and work focused on tuna supply chains in the Pacific islands. 

“What we’re focusing on now is how to translate all these steps of 100% fish, what has worked here in Iceland, what has been the secret sauce, so we can adapt and transfer that around the world,” Alexandra explains.  

The cluster is also developing a “100% Fish Playbook” intended as a practical manual for industry, governments and startups, and will soon be launching what Alexandra calls a “transformational 100% leadership program”, funded by Builders Vision. The aim is to bring leaders from different geographies and aquatic food systems to Iceland to learn how to prototype products, build business cases, and connect research, entrepreneurs and industry in a way that supports scaling up. 

Alexandra sees access to funding as one of the most significant barriers for emerging blue economy companies, which is why she works closely with Blue Nova Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on ocean technology. She says the aim is to “put our money where our mouth is” and support the promising ideas that surface through the cluster network but often struggle to secure backing. Her role is to link the fund with regional scouts across its 12 sister clusters so that promising companies can be identified early and directed toward investment opportunities. The intention, she explains, is to “help make that capital more mobile” and reduce the financial bottlenecks that prevent good ideas from succeeding. 

Alexandra is also helping expand the physical and industrial infrastructure needed for circular solutions to scale, working as an advisor for the Iceland Eco Business Park, a much larger “industrial symbiosis” site that, Alexandra explains, extends the “100%” philosophy into the blue-green economy.  

Most recently, Alexandra has taken her own first step as a founder – which perhaps is another of those “red threads”, looping back to link between energy and food that first “rattled around” in her mind as a recent graduate. She is now in the early stages of building a circular economy startup, Hringvarmi, which is capturing excess heat from data centres and channelling it into retrofitted shipping containers designed as food-production pods for Arctic environments: “We have just grown our first microgreens at the atNorth Data Center Iceland.” 

It is, she says, another expression of the same worldview. “Everything’s connected and everything’s circular. There’s no such thing as waste.”