Elan earned his Ph.D at Rutgers University/New Brunswick in Cognitive Psychology in 2004 , followed by a postdoc at Brown University in Cognitive Science. He joined FAU in 2007 as director of the Visual Mind Lab, which conducts behavioral and computational work in vision science, learning and memory. More recently, he co-founded the MPCR to begin an interdisciplinary effort to investigate the basic computational principles underlying cognition and behavior using a platform of artificial neural networks that control robotic agents behaving within a natural environment. The long-term goal of this initiative is to begin developing a unified computational theory of embedded cognitive function.