She is the Principal Investigator of NASA's Psyche mission to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, Arizona State University Vice President of the Interplanetary Initiative, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking.

She was a professor at MIT, a research scientist at Brown University, and a lecturer at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and worked in the business world for a number of years.

Within 10 years of completing her Ph.D. and serving as an associate professor in geology at MIT, she was recruited to the directorship position at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism.

She became the director of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Science on July 1, 2014.

In 2022, a newly discovered mineral, elkinstantonite, found in the El Ali meteorite, was named after Elkins-Tanton by Dr. Andrew Locock of the University of Alberta.