Ellen De Brabander

Ellen de Brabander, Ph.D, joined ADM’s Board of Directors in 2023. She currently serves as the executive vice president of Innovation and Regulatory Affairs at Elanco. In that role, she drives early and late-stage pipeline execution across pet health and farm animals, including nutritional health solutions.

De Brabander is a highly accomplished R&D leader with a proven background of accomplishments in animal health research and development. Ellen joined Elanco from PepsiCo, where she served as senior vice president for R&D with company-wide responsibility for food safety, quality, regulatory and digital transformation in R&D, and before that, for all product innovations for the nutrition category. Prior to PepsiCo, Ellen led R&D organizations for Merial (now Boehringer Ingelheim), Intervet (now Merck Animal Health) and DSM.

De Brabander earned her doctorate cum laude in bio-organic chemistry from Leiden University in The Netherlands and completed her post-doctoral work in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with Nobel Laureate Khorana. She is the co-author of more than 60 publications in scientific journals, holds 18 patents, and has received multiple awards for her research, including the Golden Medal from the Royal Dutch Chemical Society in 2000 for Best Chemist under 40. In addition to her corporate success, she has been a founding board member of EIT (European Institute of Technology) and founding CEO of EIT Food, the largest public-private partnership in the food sector.