Julissa Villanueva

Semma Julissa (Julissa) Villanueva Barahona (born 12 May 1972) is a Honduran public servant, who is the Director of the Honduras Public Prosecutor's Office Forensic Medicine Department.

Education Julissa Villanueva was born in Tegucigalpa in 1972. She studied medicine after seeing her father suffering from tetanus, and is now a doctor who specialises in pathology. She chose to specialise in pathology when she heard about the shortage of skilled forensic scientists in Honduras. In 2015 she launched the Journal of Forensic Sciences of Honduras.

Villanueva works to protect women and children from violent crimes in Honduras. Working with Spain, Villanueva is developing a program called DNA Prokids. She has encouraged the Public Prosecutor's Office to give accredited training to forensic scientists. She introduced a computerised database to store information in the morgue. Villanueva created the first humanitarian cemetery in Honduras, which allows unclaimed or unidentified corpses to be exhumed and used as evidence in clinical trials, inspired by the military cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. She developed a Nationwide Human Identification Registry to handle the unsolved murders across the country. She was awarded the honour by Melania Trump.