As an undergraduate student, Elizabeth Crone had difficulty deciding whether to study biology/ecology or architecture/urban planning. Now, she is a population ecologist studying population ecology of butterflies, bees, and perennial wildflowers. She received a Ph.D. in Botany from Duke University in 1996, and then was a postdoctoral researcher in Zoology at University of Washington, a professor of Wildlife Biology for a decade at the University of Montana, and a professor of Biology for a decade at Tufts University. Since 2022, she has been a professor of Evolution and Ecology at University of California Davis. She began expanding her research program to include urban pollinator conservation in towns and cities in 2018 (or so), which in many ways brings her career back to its origins.