{"id":22609,"date":"2025-10-20T23:59:57","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T03:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mote.org\/staff\/alana-espinosa\/"},"modified":"2026-01-10T23:31:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T04:31:07","slug":"alana-espinosa","status":"publish","type":"staff","link":"https:\/\/mote.org\/staff\/alana-espinosa\/","title":{"rendered":"Alana Espinosa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Alana is a West Coast native, and growing up in California by the beaches sparked her interest in Marine life and conservation from a very young age. She got an academic scholarship to Hawaii Pacific University where she graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2023. There she honed her research skills by spearheading a 13 month long project into the effects of nutrient pollution on Hawaiian estuary microbes and provided HAB mitigation recommendations to a National Wildlife Refuge. She joined the Mote team in October of 2025 and hopes to continue to sharpen her research skills and experience with harmful algal species such as<\/span><em>\u00a0Karenia brevis\u00a0<\/em><span style=\"color:#000000\">and\u00a0<\/span><em>Alexandrium tamarense<\/em><span style=\"color:#000000\">\u00a0and to protect Florida coasts from Red Tide and other blooms through continued mitigation research.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":18231,"template":"","department":[36],"class_list":["post-22609","staff","type-staff","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","department-phytoplankton-ecology-program"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Alana Espinosa | Mote Marine Laboratory &amp; Aquarium<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/mote.org\/staff\/alana-espinosa\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Alana Espinosa | Mote Marine Laboratory &amp; Aquarium\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Alana is a West Coast native, and growing up in California by the beaches sparked her interest in Marine life and conservation from a very young age. 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