Elisabeth Herniou is a Research Director at the CNRS based at the Insect Biology Research Institute, a shared research unit between the CNRS and the University of Tours, in France. Deeply rooted in evolutionary biology, her research interests mainly focus on the interplay between genomes and ecology in the context of host parasite interactions, such as between viruses and insects, and lies at the intersect of several disciplines ranging from virology to evolutionary biology. She has studied speciation and how to define species in animals, as well as viruses, giving her an entry point in biodiversity studies through metabarcoding and metagenomic approaches. Her work in virus discovery, phylogenetics and comparative genomics led to the taxonomic revisions of several viral families. Her studies in population genomics unveiled some of the forces at play at the genome level during ecological adaptation to different hosts in baculoviruses and parasitic wasps, a subject of interest for improving biological control applications. Because in real life, the outcome of host parasite interactions also derives from extrasinc factors, such as food and microbiota, she currently takes a keen interest in studying insect health, and the triggers of pathologies to gain a better understanding of the ecological interactions that may impact insect health, a topic particularly relevant to insect mass rearing for feed and food.