Ellen Matthies is professor of environmental psychology at the Otto-von-Guericke-University since 2011, from 2009 to 2011 she was professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, and member of the “Environment and Risk Psychology”-unit. She did her habilitation at the Ruhr-University Bochum, where she also received her PhD. Her research focus is on the analysis of environmentally relevant behaviours and decisions. Ellen Matthies has guided several research projects in the fields of social and environmental psychology (mainly funded by the DFG but also by the Norwegian Research Council, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, or the European Commission); her work group in Magdeburg focuses on the many roles of individuals in a transformation process towards a sustainable society. Most of the current research projects are inter- and transdisciplinary, ranging from analyses of individual acceptance of policy measures, via cognitive biases in consumption decisions to investigations of the relation between wellbeing and individual support of the transformation.

Ellen Matthies was member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) (2013 to 2020), she is a member of the board of directors of ESYS (Energy Systems of the Future, an initiative of the German Academies of Sciences), and since February 2022 Spokesperson of the Environmental psychology division of the German Psychological Society (DGPs).