About
Elisabetta examines how shocks — from conflict to natural hazards — reshape urban well-being, inequality, and displacement, drawing on digital trace data, administrative data, and fieldwork. She is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Geographic Data Science and Deputy Lead of the Geographic Data Science Lab at the University of Liverpool, and Deputy Director of IMAGO, the ESRC SDR-UK Imagery Data Service.
Her current projects include FloodTraces, mapping flood displacement across Pakistan, Colombia, and Indonesia; ongoing work on displacement during the Ukraine conflict; and research on well-being in war-affected cities in Palestine. Elisabetta has previously held positions as a Visiting Research Fellow at LSE Geography and Environment, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity, and Research Associate at the LSE Middle East Centre.
Her research bridges spatial econometrics and qualitative methods with geographic data science, combining digital trace data — satellite imagery and mobile phone GPS — with surveys, interviews, and text analysis to understand how displacement and vulnerability unfold in conflict and natural hazard settings. Over the past decade, this work has centred on the Middle East, including studies of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, and has involved partnerships with IOM–UN Migration, UNHCR, UN-Habitat, FCDO, OECD, DEFRA, and Flowminder. Elisabetta believes that generating useful evidence for cities demands multiple methods and genuine public engagement, combining quantitative rigour with citizen science to co-design pathways for policy and practice.