Natalya Gallo

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Natalya Gallo is a marine ecologist and oceanographer who studies how warming oceans and falling oxygen levels affect marine life and fisheries. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, receiving the Morris K. Udall Scholarship to research cnidarian bleaching at Stanford, and a Ph.D. in biological oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Her work focuses on ocean deoxygenation and its impact on biodiversity, including how low-oxygen waters change which species thrive, how dense they are, and how they fit into food webs. She has studied the California Current, the Gulf of California, and off Chile, and has published on demersal fish in oxygen-depleted zones. Using remotely operated vehicles and deep-sea sensors, she has shown that even small increases in temperature can harm species adapted to low-oxygen conditions and may threaten commercially valuable fish.

Gallo also discovered two fish species that live in low-oxygen environments. Beyond research, she aims to connect science with policy. In 2013 she co-founded Ocean Scientists for Informed Policy to push for ocean issues in climate talks, influencing discussions around the Paris Agreement. She has participated in United Nations climate negotiations and has received several honors, including the Switzer Fellowship, UCSD Chancellor’s Dissertation Award, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018.