Elizabeth Borer

Elizabeth T. Borer is an American ecologist and a Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota. Born in Pennsylvania, Borer graduated from Oberlin College in 1991, spent several years working outside the academy, then returned to earn her Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2002 (advised by William W. Murdoch and Allan Stewart-Oaten). She went on to do postdoctoral training in the Integrative Biology Department at University of California, Berkeley with Cheryl Briggs, then a second postdoc at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. She was an Assistant Professor in the Zoology Department at Oregon State University (2004-2009) and an Associate and Full Professor at the University of Minnesota (2010-present).
Since 2007, Borer has led the Nutrient Network, a global network linking over 300 environmental scientists working cooperatively to rigorously study the impacts of global changes by replicating experiments at 140 sites in 27 different countries on 6 continents. In addition to her work developing and fostering multi-continent scientific collaborations as a tool for studying global change, Borer's research has advanced knowledge about the role and feedbacks of disease in community and ecosystem ecology.
Research.
Elizabeth Borer studies how ecological communities are impacted by large environmental changes such as nitrogen deposition, carbon dioxide emissions, invasive species or extinction of species. She is an empiricist and experimentalist, but uses mathematical modeling to guide her hypotheses. In 2006, she was among the scientists who conceived the Nutrient Network, a collaborative research project studying global change in grasslands. In 2019, she helped launch DRAGNet (Disturbance and Resources Across Global Grasslands), a collaborative global research project to assess the impact of human activity on ecosystems. 