Ellen Nollen is Group Leader of the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology of Ageing at the European Research Institute for the Biology of Ageing. Her research fields are protein aggregation, neurodegeneration, ageing and C. elegans. 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.