Dr. Kathleen Teresa Martínez is a Dominican lawyer, archaeologist, and diplomat, best known for her work since 2005 in the search for the tomb of Cleopatra in the Taposiris Magna temple in Egypt. She heads the Egyptian-Dominican mission in Alexandria and is currently minister counselor in charge of cultural affairs at the Dominican embassy in Egypt. When she was younger her father, professor and legal scholar Fausto Martínez, owned an extensive private library, which she drew on to research the subject that would become her great passion – Egypt and the last days of Cleopatra. Despite her childhood passion for Egypt, Dr.Martínez focused her early studies on a legal career following her father's footsteps. Her parents convinced her that a career in archeology wouldn't be worthwhile because to them it wasn't a "serious" job and believed one could not make a living from that profession. She graduated law school at 18 and has a career as a criminal lawyer in the Dominican Republic. Her obsession with Cleopatra originated from an argument with her father in the 1990s and a group of friends who deemed Cleopatra's biography as insignificant. Dr. Martínez asserts that delving into Cleopatra's history, despite the influence of Roman propaganda and enduring biases against women over the centuries, revealed a figure ahead of her time. Cleopatra, who Dr. Martínez claims studied at the university, had to endure the denigration by the Romans. Dr. Martínez made her first trip to Egypt in 2002. She managed to contact Zahi Hawass, the archaeologist and director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and visit some temples. It was then that she made a big discovery that changed the architecture of Egyptian temples. Dr. Martinez found the two chambers in the Temple of Taposiris Manga where the tomb of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony could be. She returned to her country and prepared a project with the support of the Universidad Católica Santo Domingo to begin excavating. It was the first time that Egypt had granted a license to excavate to a country in Latin America. Dr. Kathleen Martínez herself financed the first expedition and many others. Work began in 2004. In 2005, she decided to leave her law practice to move to Egypt and dedicate herself to archaeology. Dr. Martinez then returned to the Dominican Republic, met with the Dominican Republic Minister of Foreign Affairs, and was appointed as the first Minister of Culture to Egypt, and was issued a diplomatic passport. Dr. Martinez and her team have since uncovered a huge religious center with three sanctuaries, a sacred lake, more than 1,500 objects, busts, statues, golden pieces, and a huge collection of coins portraying Alexander the Great, Queen Cleopatra and the Ptolemies. While it’s currently uncertain if she’ll ever reach her goal of finding Cleopatra's tomb, she’ll at least go down in history as one of the very few archaeologist-lawyers.

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