Submitted by editor on 26 September 2025.

We are happy to welcome Dr. Elise Thébault, from Paris, France, to the Oikos Editorial Board. To know more about her, read our interview below!

Website: https://iees-paris.fr/annuaire/thebault-elisa/

What's your main research focus at the moment?

My research mostly aims to investigate the responses of communities and ecosystems to global changes and to better understand the links between diversity, structure of interaction networks between species and stability of ecosystem functioning. I have a particular interest in better linking theoretical approaches including mathematical modeling with experimental or empirical approaches.

Can you describe your research career? Where, what, when?

I got my Ph.D. in Ecology at Sorbonne University in Paris in 2005, studying the impact of trophic interactions on the relation between diversity and ecosystem functioning. I then did a postdoc of three years at the Centre for Population Biology in Silwood Park (Imperial College London, UK), mainly working on the links between network structure and stability in mutualistic and trophic networks, and then a one-year postdoc at Biometris in Wageningen University (NL) modelling the structure of soil food webs. Since 2011, I am a researcher at CNRS at the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris and based at Sorbonne University.

How come that you became a scientist in ecology?

I mainly discovered ecology as a science during my undergraduate years as an engineer student at AgroParisTech. I wanted to work in connection with biodiversity and environmental questions in relation to global change and I liked mathematics, so theoretical ecology was a perfect fit.

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