Elma Blom joined the Department of Development and Education of youth in Diverse Societies (DEEDS) in 2012 where she holds the chair Language Development and Multilingualism in Family and Education. She worked as a postdoc and Marie Curie fellow at the University of Amsterdam (2004-2007) and University of Alberta in Canada (2008-2011), and was adjunct professor at the Arctic University of Norway (2020-2024).

In the past years, Elma Blom has led several large-scale research programmes on multilingualism, such as the NWO Vidi project Cognitive Development in the Context of Emerging Bilingualism (CoDEmBi). Currently, she leads the NWO Vici project Children and Language Mixing: developmental, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic aspects (CALM) and the NWA-ORC project Multilingual voices in STEM education (Multi-STEM). She studies multilingualism in families and in formal and informal education, and is an expert in the field of language disorders (also combined with multilingualism). Together with colleagues, she investigates the language development of extremely premature children and children growing up with a regional language.

Elma Blom is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Child Language. She is co-developer of the LITMUS-NL test battery and the Dutch version of the Early Sociocognitive Battery (ESB). She is a member of the Utrecht University Descartes Centre, the steering committee of the focus area Migration and Societal Change, and the advisory board of the Centre for Digital Humanities.