She is the Viktor Hamburger Professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is noted for her work in epigenetics, gene regulation, and heterochromatin, and for her contributions to science education.

[3][1] While at Pomona, she participated in a summer research program at the University of Leeds characterizing the egg stalk of the green lacewing fly Chrysopa vittata.

[4] Elgin did her graduate work in the lab of James Bonner at the California Institute of Technology, isolating and characterizing nonhistone chromosomal proteins from rat livers.

After her postdoc, Elgin joined the faculty in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University,[1] where her lab pioneered immunostaining of polytene chromosomes from Drosophila larval salivary glands[5] and nuclease digestion assays.

[13][14][15] In June 2005, Elgin held a one-day hands-on introductory workshop at Washington University in St. Louis, to show visiting faculty what her students were able to do in genome annotation.