Paulina serves as the embedded technical officer providing adaptive management and learning support to the foundation’s Environmental Conservation Program, in addition to supporting foundation-wide efforts in building capacity and creating learning opportunities in adaptive management.

Paulina transitioned to the foundation's Adaptive Management and Evaluation team after nine years as a program officer for the Andes-Amazon Initiative, which has significantly contributed to the conservation of almost half of the Amazon biome. Paulina led and managed the protected areas and Indigenous lands grantmaking in the Andean Amazon. In this role, she led collaborations with partners to further consolidate

conservation in the Amazon region such as establishing Peru’s Natural Legacy fund as a long-term financing mechanism for all of Peru’s Amazon protected areas and communal reserves and a similar fund, Herencia Colombia. She also served as primary manager for monitoring, data capture, analysis, and visualization, and learning for the initiative.

During her tenure as a program officer, she also contributed to donor-led collaborations such as serving as co-chair for the Funders of the Amazon Basin. She is currently active on the board of the Conservation Measures Partnership and Planet Women, a newly formed non-profit organization focused on empowering women’s roles in conservation.

She came to Moore with a fifteen-year plus career dedicated to rights-based conservation and sustainable development in Latin America and globally, focused on local community participation in park and natural resource management. Prior to joining the foundation, she worked at The Nature Conservancy for ten years in various roles, first as Condor Bioreserve coordinator, then as Andes Amazon program manager, and, in her last position, as director of the Indigenous and Communal Lands Global Strategy. Paulina is known as a strong advocate for local community and stakeholder participation in environmental conservation, which culminated in preparing the Conservancy’s first draft of principles for working with Indigenous peoples and local communities. Her contributions include promoting the creation of the first ecological reserve and Indigenous territory in Ecuador (Kofan-Bermejo Reserve), leading the first Ecuadorian protected areas sustainable finance strategy, consolidating the first water fund in Latin America -the Quito Water Fund- and co-drafting guidance on incorporating human well-being and community participation in the Conservancy’s conservation planning framework.

While at The Nature Conservancy, Paulina coordinated conservation projects in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia. Previously, she co-founded a non-profit in Ecuador focused on bridging social sciences with biological conservation (Grupo Randi Randi, which continues to operate) and served as president for its first two years. She was also head of the community conservation program for an Ecuadorian grassroots organization, Antisana Foundation, founded to engage local communities in park management and natural resources.

Paulina holds a Master of Environmental Management from Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment with a focus on environmental leadership as well as a Bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her post-graduate studies include gender and natural resources management at FLACSO-Ecuador. Paulina speaks English, Spanish and Portuguese.