Jacintha Ellers

Prof. dr. Jacintha Ellers is a Dutch academic in the fields of ecology and evolution. She is a full professor and currently director of the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA). 

After receiving a Cum Laude PhD (1998) from Leiden University for her work on life history evolution in parasitoids, she moved to Stanford University for a postdoc. In her current position at VUA, she obtained several prestigious personal grants to unravel how the interplay of genes, genome, and environment allows adaptive evolution of traits in response to anthropogenic global change. Her research group focuses on a diversity of topics including invasion ecology, host-symbiont genomics, evolution of lipid metabolism, phenotypic plasticity, and urban ecology. 

Her research contributions include over 180 publications in journals including Science, PNAS, Nature Communications, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Nature Climate Change, and Global Change Biology. 

Jacintha Ellers has served on a diversity of national and international boards and committees, including Dutch Biology Council (chair), European Society for Evolutionary Biology, the interdisciplinary Origins Center, European invertebrate survey (chair), and is co-founder of the Netherlands Society for Evolutionary Biology. She also is an active advocate for gender balance in science.