Vice-President: 2025 –
Communications Officer: 2023 – 2005
Dr Paula Cartwright is a research scientist based at James Cook University’s Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystems Research Centre (TropWATER). At TropWATER, Paula manages a range of projects based around water quality monitoring (marine and freshwater), biodiversity, and wetland restoration, working with a number of industry, government, and non-government organisations, as well as cross-university collaborations.
Paula first joined the Australian Marine Science Association (AMSA) as an undergraduate and has performed the role of eNews editor for the past six years. Paula was elected to the AMSA national council in the position of Communication Officer in 2023. She represented AMSA at Science Meets Parliament in 2022 and is also a member of the North Queensland AMSA council.
Paula is a sitting member on the Wet Tropics, Dry Tropics and Mackay/Whitsunday/Isaac Technical Working groups as marine water quality expert. The working groups advise on the Healthy Waterways Report Cards that are produced annually to assess the condition of each region’s catchments, estuaries, inshore marine and offshore marine zones.
Paula has a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Environmental Biology from Curtin University and a PhD from The University of Western Australia’s ‘Oceans Institute’. Her research outputs include remote sensing-based analyses of long-term turbidity and it associated metocean drivers in arid tropical Australia, long-term spatial variations in turbidity and temperature driving coral-algal states on extreme/marginal reefs and applying climate models to predict future turbidity at marginal coral reefs. Her current research is looking at environmental water security across northern Australia, the groundwater/surface water interactions in temporary waterholes across Gulf Country, wet season river flood plumes in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the effect of turbidity on spectral light wavelengths reaching benthic habitats in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.