Catalina Cuellar-Gempeler (born August 25, 1984) is a Colombian microbial ecologist and marine microbiologist, currently an Associate Professor at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Her father Carlos Cuellar Cubides is a Colombian gastroenterologist in Bogotá, while her mother, Emilia Gempeler, of Swiss descent, is a senior occupational health nurse.
After obtaining her PhD in 2016, Cuellar-Gempeler was hired as a post-doctoral scholar at Florida State University for two years, where she began working with carnivorous pitcher plants and their associated microbial communities.
Before graduating from the University of the Andes, she took a semester off to take a field guiding course at Kruger National Park, South Africa, where she improved her knowledge about African ecosystems and her leading and teaching skills.
Cuellar-Gempeler's lab main focus is on Biodiversity-Ecosystem function relationships in pitcher plant meta-communities, microbial ecology of conservation of Astragalus applegatei's mycorrhizae, and microbiome of invasive marine invertebrates.