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Ellen joined AFT’s Water Initiative in November 2020. She works closely with her fellow scientists in the Water and Climate Initiatives as well as with regional staff to achieve cleaner water, healthier soils, and climate change resiliency within major U.S. commodity crop production systems through research on the economic and environmental impacts of soil health practices. As part of AFT’s Soil Health Economic Accelerator Team, she co-leads the use, improvements, and research relating to AFT’s retrospective, predictive, and online soil health economic calculator (R-SHEC) tools. Ellen manages the Case Study author team that produces AFT’s soil health economic case studies. Ellen is also involved with on-farm demonstration trials, developing other economic tools, soil health economics literature reviews, and soil health impact on ag water resources research. Ellen received her bachelor’s degree in environmental science and chemistry from Washington and Lee University. She has a Master of Science degree in agricultural and applied economics with a focus on water conservation from the University of Wyoming. Ellen’s thesis research presents a modeling framework to analyze the financial, wetland, and return flow trade-offs of paying agricultural producers to use less water given water availability uncertainty in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Previously, Ellen has worked as a water quality research assistant and field technician. She has published her research on microplastic pollution in the Snake and Columbia Rivers (the first study on microplastic pollution in the intermountain west). Ellen is based in Driggs, Idaho.