PAUL JENSEN

PAUL JENSEN is a Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, affiliated with the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine and Marine Biology Research Division. His work focuses on microbial interactions in marine environments, genomics, and natural product discovery. He holds degrees from Florida Institute of Technology (B.S.), San Diego State University (M.S.), and UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography (PhD).

Research interests include microbial distributions in marine plants/invertebrates, sequence-based natural product discovery, comparative genomics, and marine microbial chemical ecology. He explores biogeography of marine bacteria and evolutionary biology of microbial populations.

Recent publications (2021–2025) highlight advancements in genome mining techniques, marine-derived antibiotic discovery, and climate-related microbiome studies. Key themes include Salinispora species genomics, biosynthetic gene clusters, and applications of metagenomics in understanding microbial biodiversity.

Jensen’s work bridges marine microbiology with biotechnology, emphasizing drug discovery from marine actinomycetes and ecological impacts of pollutants. His lab contributes to both fundamental science and translational research in marine biotechnology.