Elissa a freelance scientific illustrator who has worked on a variety of subjects including plants, birds, bats, geology, paleontology reconstructions, medical diagrams, and more. She prefers the traditional techniques of graphite, pen & ink, and watercolor, but she also works digitally in both vector and digital painting formats. She has illustrated two sports mechanics books and her illustrations have been published in Nature Communications, Systematic Botany, Journal of Archeological Science, Current Biology, Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B, among others.

Elissa believes anyone can learn to draw and that, for scientists in particular, learning to illustrate and working with illustrators is synergistic with scientific research and improves research outcomes. She teaches occasional illustration workshops and is developing online resources for those interested in learning scientific illustration. She earned her Sc.B in Biology from Brown University and a certificate in Natural Science Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently a joint PhD candidate at Columbia University and the New York Botanical Garden, where she studies fern development and the evolution of plant life cycles. Upon completion of her PhD, she will start her postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School.