Ellen V. Rothenberg (born 1952) is an American biologist who is an Edward B. Lewis Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology.

She credits her parents with giving her a strong sense of one's potential and says her father "taught [her] math and logic to the point that [she] got in trouble with [her] teachers".

[1] After earning her bachelor's degree, Rothenberg started a MD–PhD program offered jointly by Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Rothenberg was a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow with Edward Boyse at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

[citation needed] Rothenberg studies the transcription factors that induce gene expression to guide development of T-lineage cells.