Elan is associate director of the Center for the Future Mind, an associate professor at Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, and co-director of the Machine Perception and Cognitive Robotics (MPCR) Lab. Barenholtz earned his doctorate degree in experimental psychology and cognitive science at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University, Rhode Island. Barenholtz began his career as an experimental psychologist, investigating human perception from a behavioral and cognitive-science perspective, and co-founded the MPCR to develop theories and applications of broad brain properties and test them embedded in robotic agents and applied to real-world problems.