When you do a google search for “ecologist,” the first few images that pop up are women. Of the top 10 images, 7 of them show women in the field. This is vastly different from the face of science many years ago. While many women have been influential and contributed to the field their impacts are often hidden. In my undergrad experience, of the countless course I’ve taken, I’ve only had 5 female science professors. This is not representative of women’s contributions to scientific academia at all.

 For this reason, I chose to highlight female ecologist, Elena M. Bennett. Bennett is an associate professor at McGill School of Environment and Department of Natural Resource Sciences and is also the Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Science at McGill. She has been working at McGill since 2005.

 Her research focusses on managing ecosystem services, agricultural production and water quality, human influence on phosphorous cycles through farming, and high levels of phosphorus in lakes leading to increased algae and aquatic plant growth. Bennett has made over 100 publications and been cited over 45,242 times (according to google scholar), earning her an H-index of 51. She already has 3 publications this year according to the Bennett Lab website. She is also a member of the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science. Bennett began her academic journey at Oberlin College where she majored in Biology and Environmental Studies (graduated cum laude). She then moved on to earn her MSc. in 1999 at the University of Wisconsin in Land Resources. A few years later, in 2002, she received her PhD in Limnology and Marine Sciences. Her PhD thesis is available online in open access. Her post-doctoral research took place at the University of Wisconsin where she worked on the Scenarios Working Group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. She has supervised over 60 undergraduates, graduate, and post graduate students. 

 In 2012, Bennett received the Leopold Leadership Fellow. In 2017, she was inducted in the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. Bennett co-chairs the Scientific Committee of ecoServices, which investigates the impact of biodiversity alteration on the ecosystem services. 

Elena Bennet is one of the many women in ecology who are consistently working to encourage conversations surrounding the interactions with ecosystem services and humans as in the Monteregie Connection. This project involves studying the relationship between human lifestyle landscape structure and biodiversity to develop a tool that can be used in planning (by people who may not have scientific background) to achieve a balance between maintaining the biodiversity of the ecosystem and meeting human needs.

Please see a link to Elena Bennett’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Bennett

PhD thesis: https://uwmadison.app.box.com/s/s2e3zbg615x4tdk17vc3id242weuzptk

Twitter: @ElenaBennett

The Bennet Lab at McGill: http://bennettlab.weebly.com

Bennett Lab at McGill: http://bennettlab.weebly.com

Enabling Long-Term Planning in the Monteregie Region of Quebec by Elena Bennett: https://leopoldleadership.stanford.edu/resources/enabling-long-term-planning-mont-r-gie-region-quebec