Susan Ellis (geophysicist)

In 2021, Ellis was a co-winner (along with first author Donna Eberhart Phillips) of the Geological Society of New Zealand's "New Zealand Geophysics Prize", the society's top geophysical award bestowed upon the author or authors of the most meritorious recent publication in the field of geophysics.

In 2005, Ellis was elected president of the New Zealand Geophysics Society (which has since merged to become the New Zealand Geoscience Society). In 2020, she was awarded the Geological Society of New Zealand's "New Zealand McKay Hammer Award" for the most outstanding published research on New Zealand geology in the preceding three years. The citation reads "For a body of work as a leading geodynamic modeller, making pivotal contributions to our understanding of tectonics".

Susan Marian Ellis (born 1965) is a geophysicist based in New Zealand, who specialises in modelling the geodynamics of the Earth's crust deformation, at different scales. Ellis is a principal scientist at GNS Science and her main interests are in subduction, seismology, tectonics, crust and petrology. Ellis's current work focuses on the influence of faulting on stresses in the crust, and how this is related to geological hazard and the tectonic settings in New Zealand.

Born in 1965, Ellis earned a Bachelor of Science degree with honours at Victoria University of Wellington. She subsequently completed her PhD in 1995 at Dalhousie University, where she examined the forces driving continental collision using numerical models, applied to Tibet and New Zealand. This was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Dalhousie University (1996–1997), as part of the Lithoprobe programme, and the University of Berne, studying the geodynamics of the Swiss Alps.