Professor Jane Elith FAA is an ecologist in the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne. She graduated from the School of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Melbourne in 1977. She specialises in ecological models that focus on spatial analysis and prediction of the habitat of plant and animal species. Following graduation, she was a research assistant and tutor for three years, and then spent the following 12 years raising her children. She returned to the University of Melbourne in 1992 and later commenced a part-time PhD in the School of Botany. She was awarded her PhD in 2002 on 'Predicting the distribution of plants'. Since then, she has been a research fellow in the School of Botany. She is currently an ARC Future Fellow and sits within the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis at the University of Melbourne.
Elith is known primarily for her work on statistical models and data, and has mostly focused on species distribution models. Elith is interested in the methods used to model the distribution of species, and focuses on how they work, how to improve them for typical data types and applications, and how to deal with their uncertainties.[1] She is particularly interested in understanding how models work and in finding technical solutions to improve their performance. She is also interested in and contributes to their use for practical applications.
Dean of Science at the University of Melbourne, Professor Karen Day, said Dr Elith was blazing a trail for women in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).[2]
She won the 2016 Fenner Medal awarded by the Australian Academy of Science for research in biology. In 2020, she was honoured to be an international member of the National Academy of Sciences.[3]