Catalina coming out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s DSV Alvin Submersible after her first dive in the Gulf of Alaska in 2004 with assistance from Alvin pilot Mark Spear. 
Catalina accepting her 2019 Women of Color in STEM Diversity Leadership in Government Award for demonstrating sustained leadership in creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive Federal workforce. 
Catalina sitting on top of the Institute for Exploration’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Hercules during the Lost City Expedition on the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown in 2005.
Photo credit: Dave Wright.
Catalina Martinez is the Equity Advisor for NOAA Ocean Exploration, providing strategic guidance to help integrate and advance diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility and justice (DEIAJ) priorities within NOAA, and also externally across a broad spectrum of STEM institutions and agencies. This work includes considering new ways to infuse DEIAJ across operations, programs, procedures, data access and service delivery, and expanding partnerships that prioritize co-creation and sustainable relationship building with underrepresented marginalized and minoritized groups and communities.
Martinez also works in a variety of ways to help mitigate barriers to entry, persistence, advancement and success for diverse groups in STEM academic programs and the workforce. She is a certified diversity professional with four degrees from the University of Rhode Island (URI B.S. ’97, URI GSO M.S. ’00, URI M.M.A. ’02, URI M.B.A. ’15), and began her ocean science career with NOAA more than 20 years ago, helping to formalize and manage important regional NOAA partnerships in the Northeast, and spent many years working on telepresence-enabled expeditions to explore little-known and unknown ocean areas.
Most recently Martinez was one of the guest editors of The Oceanography Society’s first-ever special edition of its journal Oceanography on Building Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Ocean Sciences.
Martinez says she is grateful to URI for “providing the opportunity to explore my scientific interests as a non-traditional student, and for helping me find my way to a very unlikely ocean science career.” She also says the mandatory cruise experience at GSO paved the way for her interest in pursuing additional ship-based opportunities as part of her career, and catalyzed her determination to help improve the safety and culture for women and individuals from underrepresented minoritized and other marginalized groups on board research vessels. “My academic and personal experiences at GSO were certainly instrumental in my professional pursuits and overall, how I’ve engaged and navigated within the STEM world,” she says.
Learn more about Catalina from her 2023 University of Rhode Island Distinguished Achievement Award Recipient lecture, in which she discussed her non-traditional career trajectory and shared some personal insights associated with the barriers and challenges to entry, persistence, advancement and success for people from marginalized and minoritized backgrounds in STEM.