Paulina Huanca-Valenzuela

Paulina Huanca-Valenzuela is a 2024 Knauss Fellow with NOAA Fisheries, the agency responsible for stewardship of the nation's ocean resources and their habitat. She supports efforts to highlight NOAA Fisheries' work in the press, including responding to media inquiries, developing messaging, and writing press releases. She also collaborates with other parts of NOAA, federal agencies, and other organizations to highlight the work and partnerships of NOAA Fisheries.

Paulina defended her PhD dissertation at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in January 2024. Her studies focused on microbial communities that inhabit particles in oxygen minimum zones, which are extreme environments in the ocean where oxygen is almost undetectable. She earned her master's degree from the Universität Bremen and the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany, where she studied plankton in the Arctic Ocean. Paulina completed her undergraduate studies in biotechnology in her native country of Chile, where she studied microorganisms that inhabit highland wetlands in the Chilean Altiplano (Andean Plateau), an extreme environment in the Atacama Desert.