Ellen Ketterson


Ellen D. Ketterson is an American evolutionary biologist, behavioral ecologist, neuroendocrinologist and ornithologist best known for her experimental approach to the study of life-history trade-offs in a songbird, the Dark-eyed Junco. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biology, Director of the , and affiliate professor in Congnitive Science, Gender Studies, Integrative Study of Animal Behavior, and Neuroscience at Indiana University.

Education and career

Ketterson obtained all of her degrees from Indiana University. She received A.B. in 1966 and M.A. in 1968, both in Botany. She received her Ph.D. in 1974 in Zoology.
After receiving her doctoral degree, Ketterson was a postdoctoral scholar from 1974 to 1975 at Washington State University working with avian environmental physiologist James R. King. She was an assistant professor at Bowling Green State University from 1975 to 1977 before joining the faculty in the Department of Biology at Indiana University in 1977. Ketterson was appointed as a Distinguished Professor of Biology at Indiana University in 2006. She was also appointed as an affiliated faculty member of the Gender Studies department in 2003 and as a program faculty member of the Cognitive Science department in 2006 at Indiana University.
Ketterson co-founded the at Indiana University and served as the co-director from 1990 to 2002. Ketterson has been a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University since 2007. Since 2017, Ketterson has served as the director of the at Indiana University, which aims to predict impacts of environmental change and develop solutions to prepare Indiana businesses, farmers, communities and individuals for those impacts.
In 2004, Ketterson received a Guggenheim fellowship to study plumage variation in junco species across North and Central America. Ketterson served as the president of the American Society of Naturalists in 2015. She has also won several major awards recognizing her career achievements in ornithology, including the American Ornithological Society Elliott Couse Award, Wilson Ornithological Society Margaret Morse Nice Medal, and the Alden Miller Award from the Cooper Ornithological Society. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Research

Ketterson and her trainees, with her longtime collaborator and partner Val Nolan, Jr., have conducted long-term field studies combined with experimental manipulation of free-living dark-eyed juncos at the Mountain Lake Biological Station in Virginia since the 1970s. Early in her career, Ketterson focused on differential migration, a pattern of movement in which females migrate farther than males.
Ketterson developed the experimental approach of manipulating levels of the hormone testosterone in free-living birds and comparing behavior, physiology, and fitness to controls in order to study the evolution of life history trade-offs. She coined the coined the term ‘phenotypic engineering’ to describe this approach. Ketterson's research showed that experimentally-elevated levels of testosterone increase aggression, reduce paternal care, and cause males to sing more. In addition, testosterone-treated males are preferred by females in mate choice tests and are more successful at mating outside the pair bond. However, she also found that testosterone-treated males have shorter life spans and reduced immune system function. Her research thus provided a mechanistic understanding of the fitness consequences of altering how animals allocate time and energy to competing demands.
Later, her work explored whether hormones, which affect multiple target tissues simultaneously and mediate coordinated suites of traits, either constrain or potentiate adaptation. This work foreshadowed her interest in addressing limits to organisms' ability to respond to environmental change and the role of hormonally-mediated seasonal timing of behaviors in the generation and loss of biodiversity. As the director of the , she leads a team of Indiana University researchers to prepare the Hoosier state for the effects of on-going environmental change.
The Ketterson research group currently conducts field research at a number of sites throughout the range of junco species, including in Indiana at Kent Farm on the Indiana University Research and Teaching Preserve, in the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia at the Mountain Lakes Biological Station, in California on the University of California, San Diego campus and at Laguna Mountain, in northwest Wyoming at Grand Teton National Park, Idaho, South Dakota, Mexico, and Guatemala.
The 2013 documentary film project, '' highlights years of research conducted by Ketterson and her colleagues.

Personal life

Ketterson was married for 28 years to the ornithologist Val Nolan, Jr., her Ph.D. mentor and long-time collaborator, until his death in 2008.

Awards and recognition