In 1986, she graduated from St Hilda's College, Oxford, where her doctoral thesis, The Organisation and Institutions of Female Asceticism in Fourth Century Cappadocia and Egypt, was supervised by classical historian, John F. Matthews.

[3] In 2007, Elm was part of a University of California research team that won the American Philological Association (APA) Prize for Scholarly Outreach for creating middle-school course materials on the fall of the Roman Empire.

[4] Her publications include Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Clarendon, 1994/1996); Medical Challenges for the New Millennium: An Interdisciplinary Task (Kluver, 2001), co-edited with Stefan Willich; and Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church (University of California, 2012).

Doug Lee, writing in The Classical Review, praised the work as a "stimulating exposition which negotiates the complexities of the source material and subject matter with skill and assurance.

"[6] Her book, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church was described by the Bryn Mawr Classical Review as 'a welcome and erudite study of Gregory of Nazianzus's intellectual engagement with the emperor Julian.