Zoë Hilbert

Elde Lab

Zoë Hilbert (she/her) Post-doc Helen Hay Whitney Fellow

Zoë was born in California but did most of her growing up in the Chicago suburbs where she cultivated a healthy interest in science—doing early experiments on the fish in her dad’s fish tank. She did her undergraduate work in the Big Apple, studying biochemistry at Columbia University where she worked in a chemical engineering lab trying to use directed evolution to create proteins with new functions. She then moved to a slightly smaller city (Boston), where she spent her graduate years at MIT working with C. elegans. She studied how sex-specific behaviors and natural variation in behavioral responses to infection are regulated. She is now experiencing life in the mountains for the first time as a post-doc in the Elde lab where she is studying the evolution of host-fungal interactions. In her free time, Zoë enjoys playing classical music, reading, and discovering all of the hiking trails in her new Utah environment.