Elena Baena-González is a plant biologist and Tutorial Fellow in Biology at New College, University of Oxford. Originally from Spain, she studied in Finland, earning her undergraduate degree from the University of Oulu and her DPhil from the University of Turku. After postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, she established her research group in 2008 at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science in Portugal.

Her research focuses on how plants sense and respond to nutrient and energy availability, with a particular emphasis on the SnRK1 signaling pathway, a key regulator of stress tolerance and developmental processes. Her work explores how energy signals and hormones modulate plant growth traits like flowering, root architecture, and senescence—insights that could support the development of stress-resilient crops.