Elena's work in linguistics and psycholinguistics, focussing on the ideas of Luria, Saussure, and Chompsky, enriched her epistemological and ontological quest with an understanding of the structural dimensions of meaning - deep and surface structures, universal, paradigmatic and contextual meanings. Elena taught college students and adults in Bulgaria, The United Arab Emirates, and Zimbabwe, an experience that brought into focus motivational and developmental aspects of meaning. In 1996, Elena completed her Ed.D. in Human Development at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She specialized in constructive-developmental evolution of meaning in the life-span, and taught experiential college writing at UMASS and educational psychology at Smith College. Elena's doctoral dissertation on the ontogeny of critical consciousness redefined the Freirian concept as a psychological developmental phenomenon leading to morally and socially integrated citizenship. Her work combined Neo-Piagetian theories of positiveadult development with an evolutionary socio-historical Vygotskian approach.
Elena's personal philosophy integrates ontological with socio-moral concerns into a Baha'i spiritual understanding of the post-modern age, and of the collective evolution of human consciousness at the threshold of an emerging peaceful global civilization. She offers courses on the study of consciousness and the evolving self, moral and social development, alternative clinical paradigms of mental health and health realization, qualitative research, and the emerging spiritual psychology of the 21st century. Her focus is interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, evolutionary, and dialectical, emphasizing the spiritual integration of issues of personal growth and development with collective social and global change.