Ellie was born and raised in Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan where she studied Microbiology and Spanish. She was active in reasearch throughout her undergraduate career and it was through an internship with a pharmaceutical company developing vaccines that she realized her interest in microbiology. This eventually lead her to publish her senior Honors Thesis, entitled Analysis of the genome and predicted functional heterogeneity of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which awarded the status of High Honors by the University. Ellie is currently a third year graduate student in the department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University in the lab of Zemer Gitai.