Elsbeth is Professor of Empirical Research on Learning and Instruction and head of the Institute of Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at the ETH Zurich. She studied psychology and received her doctoral degree from the University of Hamburg in 1986. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich, she began to study the interaction between intelligence, prior knowledge, and learning in STEM fields. She continued this line of research as Professor at the University of Leipzig (1994), at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin (1997), and finally as Professor of Learning and Instruction at ETH Zurich (2006). She has supervised more than 30 doctoral students and post-docs and has published in leading international journals. She has also contributed to a science-based public understanding of intelligence and learning through books (with Aljoscha Neubauer), newspaper articles, and interviews. These activities were honored in 2018 with the Franz Emmanuel Weinert Prize of the German Society for Psychology. Elsbeth Stern has repeatedly emphasized the need to bring research on intelligence and education closer together, for example in the Eysenck Lecture at the ISSID conference in Belfast in 2023.