Belle Derks obtained her MA (2001; cum laude) and Ph.D. (2007) at Leiden University. For her dissertation, titled "Social Identity Threat and Performance Motivation: The Interplay between Ingroup and Outgroup Domains," she received the 2007 Social Issues Dissertation Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). In 2008, she received an NWO VENI grant for a research project on neuropsychological approaches to studying the effects of stigmatization and exclusion. In 2015, she received an NWO VIDI grant for a project on the Queen Bee phenomenon. In 2022, she, along with various academic and societal partners, received an NWA grant for research on the economic resilience of women in the Netherlands.

From 2006 to 2015, Belle worked as a postdoc, assistant professor (2008), and associate professor (2013) at the Department of Social and Organizational Psychology at Leiden University. During this time, she spent time in laboratories in Canada (Michael Inzlicht, University of Toronto) and the United States (Tiffany Ito, University of Colorado at Boulder). In 2015, she was appointed as a professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Utrecht University. Belle was a member (2016-2021) and chair (2018-2020) of the KNAW Young Academy (DJA) and currently serves as the chair of the Kurt Lewin Institute, the national graduate school for social psychology and its applications.