Coral restoration specialist Alannah wears a lot of hats at Coral Vita, a startup working to protect and restore coral reefs.

She might be diving, cleaning trees at the coral nursery or bringing in broken coral to grow through a high-tech micro fragmentation process. She also updates the company’s database and social media accounts.

But her primary job? That’s making sure the corals “are looking happy and healthy,” she says. “That all the tentacles are out and they’re just living their best life.”

Alannah is living her best life too, doing what she loves on Grand Bahama Island – the very island where she grew up.

She spent her childhood catching fish and exploring the island in a boat that she and her friends found at the dump. “We’d be gone all day and patching holes late at night so that we could take it for a ride the next day,” she remembers. “That was my childhood.”

It was also the beginning of her career in marine science.

Alannah’s passion for the ocean led to an internship studying sharks, a diving expedition surveying coral reefs and ultimately to a degree in marine ecology. Through her work at Coral Vita, she protects the waters and reefs she loves and inspires others to do the same.

Her goal? “To tee up future generations to continue the work that we’re doing,” she says, “and to be able to enjoy the kind of waterlogged, adventurous childhood that I had. I want all children to have that.”