[4] He completed his undergraduate studies at Vincennes University in 1907, where he was an active member of the Sigma Pi fraternity.
[8] As aa young man, Ellis also served in the National Guard for four years for Indiana and then Idaho rising to the rank of sergeant.
Under the joint auspices of Indiana University and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History this expedition made valuable biological discoveries about the gymnotidae eels and fish of the region.
[10] In 1913, he and Frank Marion Andrews were published in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club with an article about the leaf hairs of salvinia natans.
[18] Beginning in 1925 and through the 1940s Ellis worked in association with the Fairport, Iowa lab of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries on the Mississippi River.
This method was thought to be a way around the parasitic stage of mussel life and was published in Science magazine that year.
[2]: 48 He also visited the Marine Laboratory on the island of Great Cumbrae, Firth of Clyde where he was able to use the Coates Research Room and Table.
With the help of Paton's introductions he also visited several medical labs in England and travelled to the Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium.
Beginning in 1930, they began to study the river as a whole and Ellis was able to prove mussels were sensitive to water quality.
The study looked at 800 miles of the Mississippi river, streams in 21 states, and mining pollution in Idaho, North Dakota, and Montana.
[2]: 54 He continued to refine his method and to study the effect of pollution on mussels needed for the button industry.
In 1982 Billy G. Isom and Robert G. Hudson published information on a solution they used to attain the same results as Ellis' group in the 1930s.
[2]: 57–58 In the late 1990s, historian Philip Scarpino had arranged with the University of Missouri to inspect Ellis's equipment and papers which had been stored in the attic of a science building.