Elisabetta is an economist with a focus on global food security issues, child and adolescent development, and food-related social protection programmes such as school feeding. Her work is highly multidisciplinary, lying at the intersection of food security and child & adolescent development, and aims at tackling key policy issues in the context of low and middle-income countries. 

She is currently focusing on the impact of household food insecurity on child development in India; the effects of an innovative school feeding program in Ghana on children and their households; how food aid and school feeding moderated the impact of conflict in Mali on children’s nutrition and education; and a variety of issues related to child and adolescent nutrition in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam.

Elisabetta obtained her PhD in Development Economics from the University of Roma Tre in Italy where she focused on food insecurity and childhood poverty in low- and middle-income countries. The suite of indicators she developed during her PhD has been adopted by FAO since 2014 to track global food security. 

Elisabetta joined the Department of Management through the prestigious “Imperial College Research Fellowship” in December 2017. Prior to this, she was awarded a “Guido Cazzavillan Research Fellowship” by the University of Venice for her work on global child poverty. She also held academic appointments at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London, and at the University of Oxford, Department of International Development. She is Research Associate at Young Lives, University of Oxford, and the Leverhulme Centre for Integrated Research in Health and Agriculture (LCIRAH), University of London.

Elisabetta regularly conducts research consultancy on food security and child development for, among others, the University of Pennsylvania, FAO, UNDP, and IFPRI.

She teaches modules on "Poverty: concepts and measures" and "Food Security" at the Bsc in Global Health and in the Master in Public Health at Imperial College London, and at the Master in “Human Development and Food Security” at the University of Roma Tre, Italy.