Eleni originates from a little island in Greece, called Astypalaia. She arrived in the U.S. with a chemical engineering degree to pursue graduate studies in Environmental Science. When she received this grant, she was a Ph.D. student of Oceanography at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. Her research was on using chemical tracers in deep sea corals as indicators of past environmental conditions related to paleoclimate. She started diving in 2006, and used the grant to obtain her scientific diving certification for use diving in her paleoceanographic research on corals.