Ebert's doctoral dissertation,
Diffusion langer Polymerketten in einem eingefrorenen Zufallsmedium: eine Renormierungsgruppenanalyse, concerned the use of
renormalization to analyze the
diffusion of
polymers; she also studied
phytoplankton dynamics before shifting to her present interest in gas discharges. Her research projects on this topic at CWI are more theoretical, while her work at TU/e is experimental and applied. Ebert's groups currently work on projects on lightning physics, high voltage technology in the context of electricity nets, and applications of pulsed plasmas in agriculture and combustion engines. She has made important contributions to the modelling of lightning using partial differential equations. She is a specialist in analytical model reductions, numerical multiscale modelling and non-linear dynamics. For example, in her joint work with numerical analysts she managed to mimic lightning discharges to a very detailed level. Laboratorium experiments sustained and confirmed the theoretical research. Ebert published over 170 articles in international
peer-reviewed journals. She was the principal advisor of 15 PhD students, all at the TU/e. Most of them worked on one of the big projects for which Ebert was (one of) the
principal investigator(s). Ebert and her students worked on three out of seven STW projects in the programme 'Building on Transient Plasmas' (2009). She and her co-authors developed models describing how lightning starts in thunder clouds, namely by an interaction between sharp-edged hail and cosmic particles. Another important project, financed by STW en ABB Corporate Research, was the 'Creeping sparks project' in which Ebert and her students developed novel mathematical models and techniques to better understand the fundamental physics of sparks creeping along insulator surfaces. ==Recognition==