Elena completed Honours in 2017 at the University of Sydney, focusing on linguistic variation and language ideologies in young adults from Western and Northern Sydney (an article from which appeared in the Australian Journal of Linguistics in 2019).
She completed her PhD with the Sydney Speaks Project in 2023, conducting a lifespan study examining the speech of a group of Greek- and Italian-Australians who were recorded as teenagers (in the 1970s) and again as adults (in the 2010s). The project uses quantitative methods to investigate the role of the individual in language change and the relationship(s) between different variables (phonological, morphological and discourse) over time on the level of the community and individual.
In 2023 she started as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury, looking at perception of social meaning in co-varying vowels in New Zealand English.