Ellen Nollen currently holds a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship at the Department of Ageing of ERIBA, where she is studying the molecular basis of Parkinson’s disease and other aging-associated neurodegenerative diseases. In July 2011 she was awarded an ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant (€1.5 million) to work on ‘Protein damage control: regulation of toxic protein aggregation in aging-associated neurodegenerative diseases’, In November 2011 she was named as an EMBO Young Investigator. In 2007 she received an Alfred Tissières Young Investigator Award.

Ellen Nollen previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Dept. of Functional Genomics, Hubrecht Laboratory, Utrecht, under Prof. Ronald Plasterk, for which she had an NWO-VENI grant, and in the Dept. of Biochemistry, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA, under Prof. Rick Morimoto, during which she was supported by NWO-Talent and EMBO long-term fellowships. She completed her PhD thesis on “Hsp70 chaperone functions in stressed cells” in 2000 under Prof. Harm Kampinga at the University of Groningen.