She received her B.A. in Mathematics from Transylvania University and her Ph.D. in Psychology from The Ohio State University. Before joining the faculty at Illinois Wesleyan University in 2013, she served as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. Ellen has taught several courses with "flipped" components including a survey level fully online course, a writing intensive research methods course with flipped lectures, and a team-taught, cross-institution (Illinois Wesleyan and Transylvania Universities) May Term travel course with flipped lectures and skyped class sessions.