Ellen is currently the Coordinator of Interpretation in the Education Division at the Missouri Botanical Garden. This means she spends her time designing ways to communicate about research and science to visitors, teachers and students.

Ellen grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and is a tropical ecologist and educator. She spent a year in Bogor, Indonesia as an American Field Service (AFS) exchange student before attending Grinnell College in Iowa, where she earned a BA in Biology and a concentration in Environmental Science in 1992.

Following college, Ellen spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar, conducting research on the pollination of agroforestry trees in the Amazon Basin. Ellen's graduate research at Cornell University was conducted in Timor, Indonesia, on alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture.

Ellen then worked at a butterfly house before starting her own elementary science curriculum business.

This is Ellen's third Rough Science project.