Paula Dobbyn is an award-winning journalist specializing in environmental, energy, public accountability, and watchdog reporting. Many of her stories focus on oceans, wildfires, forests, fisheries, marine ecology, coastal hazards, biodiversity, and climate change.

Dobbyn is the incoming Snedden Chair at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Department of Science and Environmental Journalism. She teaches classes in science writing and communication, media literacy and news gathering, and is developing new curricula that will focus on reporting about climate change, resilience and adaptation.

She previously taught global communications and news writing and editing as an adjunct professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Prior to joining UAF in the fall of 2024, Dobbyn and her colleagues at Honolulu Civil Beat were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their breaking news coverage of the deadly August 2023 in Lahaina, Maui.

During her time at Civil Beat, Dobbyn deeply covered the aftermath of the Lahaina tragedy and, in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, revealed how Hawai‘i is the only state in the nation not to avail itself of FEMA’s buyout program, despite its extreme vulnerability to climate change.

Her investigative reporting revealed how an ex-NBA basketball star secretly served as an unofficial lobbyist for a controversial bioenergy plant, and how a Texas real estate tycoon with a shadowy past persuaded Maui County to give him tens of millions of dollars in subsidies..

.Dobbyn became a veteran Alaska reporter after moving to the 49th state from Washington, D.C. She has covered logging wars in North America’s only coastal temperate rainforest, homelessness, crime, and questionable police tactics in Alaska’s large city, and bitter battles over open-pit mining in the headwaters of the world’s largest sockeye salmon run.

Before embarking on print journalism, Dobbyn worked as a public radio reporter, newscaster, and producer in Boston and Washington, D.C. and as a freelance radio correspondent in Central America.

Dobbyn’s broad professional background also includes stints in public relations and communications., including working as a communications director for Alaska Sea Grant and Trout Unlimited, focusing on ocean, fisheries and watershed issues. She has also worked as a freelance magazine writer.

The child of immigrants from Dublin and Galway, Dobbyn is a New Jersey native, a dual U.S-Irish citizen, and a first-generation college graduate. She holds a cross-border master’s degree in international human rights law from Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Galway. Dobbyn earned her bachelor’s in political theory from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.

A married mother of two Alaska Native daughters, Dobbyn is a registered yoga teacher and certified as a victims’ rights advocate. She speaks conversational Spanish.

pauladob at gmail dot com