She has advised Fortune 500 companies in financial services, food & beverages, hospitality, and technology manufacturing industries on strategic compensation redesign; incentive programs; employee turnover; and identification, analysis, and resolution of multi-cultural issues. Dr. Elvira has delivered executive education programs for firms such as Allergan, Cisco Systems, IBM, PepsiCo, Cisco Systems, and Marriott International.

Prior to joining Lexington College, Dr. Marta Elvira was a tenured associate professor in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Irvine where she taught since 1995. Professor Elvira won the Teaching Excellence Award in the MBA Program (1998), was voted by UCI MBA students as an Outstanding Business Professor in the Business Week Guide to Top 50 Business Schools (1999), and has received the campus-wide UC Irvine's Teaching Excellence Award (2000). In the summer of 2001 she received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the research programs with the Office of Graduate Studies. She taught in the following programs and courses at the Graduate School of Management: Executive Leadership (Health Care MBA, Fully-Employed MBA, and Executive MBA programs), Organizational Analysis for Management (MBA core course), and Research Design and Methods (Ph.D. level).  

Dr. Elvira has also been an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD (France), where she taught the core course on Leading People in their top ranked MBA program, the Young Managers Executive Program, and other executive programs for international managers. In 1999-2000 Dr. Elvira was a visiting scholar at MIT's Sloan School of Management in the Institute for Work and Employment Research as well as at the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey (Mexico). She teaches in UCLA's Latino Leadership Programs since 2001 and more recently on the Advanced Human Resources Program.

She has recently co-edited the book Managing Human Resources in Latin America: An Agenda for International Leaders (Routledge, 2005) as well as a special issue of the International Journal of Human Resources Management on the same topic (December 2005) . Besides human resource practices and incentives in organizations, her research interest is on social inequality. Her work examines the political and economic processes involved in designing organizational reward structures, and the joint effects of incentive pay and promotion systems on employee earnings and performance. Her articles have appeared in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Work and Occupations, Industrial Relations, and Group and Organization Management . She has also published in Spanish referred Journal, including Universia Business Review and Revista de Empresa . Recognizing the contributions of her early academic career, she received the 2002 Ascendant Scholar Award of the Western Academy of Management. She has been invited to present her work in numerous universities including Northwestern University, MIT, Duke, UCLA, USC, the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), INSEAD (France), Tec de Monterrey (Mexico), ITAM (Mexico), and IESE (Barcelona).

Dean Elvira is on the Board of the Illinois Hotel and Lodging Association Educational Foundation, and a member of CHRIE (the Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education), the American Sociological Association, and the Academy of Management.