Elsa was French student in her fourth year at the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) of Toulouse which is a five-year engineering school. In 2011, she did a student exchange program in Argentina at the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA). Elsa joined the research group modelEAU for an internship.

As a member of the primEAU project, she studied an improved respirometric method to characterize the wastewater and its pollutant degrading bacteria. The work involved performing experiments with wastewater and biomass collected at different wastewater treatment plants in Quebec City, testing specific experimental conditions, and interpreting collected data.