Elisabetta Betulla Morello is a quantitative fisheries ecologist by training with a PhD in Marine biology (2004) from the University of London. She has been involved in fisheries and stock assessment since her Master’s degree in 1999. Having spent ten years at the Italian National Research council first working on the impacts of hydraulic dredges for baby clams, then on Norway lobster fisheries in the Adriatic sea and finally on the assessment of anchovy larval fisheries, in 2010 she moved to Australia where she worked for CSIRO on models of intermediate complexity for ecosystem assessments (MICE), as well as on the impacts of port and oil and gas developments on tropical and subtropical ecosystems.

In 2015 she returned to Italy with a senior Marie Curie fellowship looking at the application of models of different complexities to the same demersal fishery and management question. Since 2017 she works for the FAO General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM), first as a consultant on stock assessment and management strategy evaluation issues and now as fisheries resources officer with portfolios covering stock assessment and MSE, as well as issues pertaining to eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea fisheries, European eel and spatial management of vulnerable marine ecosystems and essential fish habitats.

She has a long-standing experience in the collection and analysis of fisheries data (including the planning and execution of surveys-at-sea), the application of different stock assessment methods and the running of MSE, all the way to the formulation of advice towards the implementation of multiannual management plans.