Alan was born in New Haven, Conn., and attended Hamden High School before coming to Princeton. He joined Campus Club and majored in biology, writing his thesis on “Feeding Activities of a Marine and a Fresh Water Bivalve Mollusk.”
Continuing his studies in the same field, he spent two years in the Department of Zoology at Yale and then a year and a half of research in Hawaii and other Pacific Islands. After further research expeditions in Asia and Europe, he accepted a position at Florida State University and spent three years there before moving to a position at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he served for 37 years until retiring. In that time, he became a leading expert on Conus, a genus of predatory, venomous sea snails found in tropical and subtropical seas throughout the world. He published more than a hundred papers and authored or co-authored four books on the subject.
Alan died Nov. 15, 2022. Predeceased by his wife and his son, he is survived by his three daughters.