Dr. Hillary Young is an Associate Professor at University California Santa Barbara. Young’s research focuses at the intersection of conservation biology with classic community and ecosystem ecology. She has had a strong focus on animal conservation and restoration in island and atoll ecosystems, with extensive work in the Line Island chain. Her more recent work has focused on ecosystem scale consequences of invasive species eradication in these atoll ecosystems.

Dr. Young was educated in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, with a PhD in Biology at Stanford University and held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institute. She has authored or coauthored more than 80 publications and is a frequent contributor in international news media.