Ellen has a bachelor in Clinical and Cognitive Neuropsychology (Cum Laude) from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and master in Neuropsychology from Maastricht University. After working as a research assistant for dr. Rosa Martens in the project: Curious Minds, she started working as a PhD student at Maastricht University in 2010. She defended her PhD thesis, entitled ‘Developing visual expertise. From shades of grey to diagnostic reasoning in radiology’, in 2016. Her supervisors were Jeroen van Merriënboer, Simon Robben and Anique de Bruin. In the meantime, she also worked with Anique de Bruin on her work on Overestimation in Education. In 2014, Ellen Kok and Anique de Bruin received funding from the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Science of Maastricht University to investigate the neural correlates of expertise in radiology and surgery using fMRI (project title 'how do residents’ brains develop?'). After her defense, Ellen visited the Visual Attention Laboratory of Jeremy Wolfe, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, USA for 3 months. After that, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University to finish the project ‘how do residents' brains develop’ before moving to Utrecht University in 2017.

Ellen worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University for four years. She worked on two projects. First of all, she was involved in the project “You see? Effects of establishing joint attention in pre-recorded and real-time modeling examples on learning” (Van Gog and Jarodzka), in which she investigated to what extent eye movements can be interpreted, used to predict performance, and adapt instruction. In the second project, she investigated learning complex visual tasks, with a focus on map-reading and radiology.

In 2021, she worked as an assistant professor at the Open University of the Netherlands in the department of online learning and instruction alongside her job as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University.