Elisabetta Pietrostefani
Applied geographer
Urban shocks, inequality & displacement
Elisabetta Pietrostefani is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Geographic Data Science and Deputy Lead of the Geographic Data Science Lab at the University of Liverpool. She is Deputy Director of IMAGO, the ESRC SDR-UK Imagery Data Service. She 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.
Elisabetta examines how shocks reshape urban well-being, inequality, and displacement. Her work bridges spatial econometrics and qualitative research with geographic data science techniques, drawing on extensive experience with digital trace data — satellite imagery and mobile phone GPS — alongside surveys, interviews, and text analysis.
She believes that generating useful evidence for cities demands multiple methods and genuine public engagement — combining quantitative rigour with participatory planning and citizen science to co-design pathways for policy and practice.
Research interests
- Urban vulnerabilities & inequalities
- Disaster geographies
- Geographic data science
- Data in data-poor contexts
Consulting & partnerships
- Bank of France
- CatalyticAction
- French Ministry of Education
- International Organization for Migration – Displacement Tracking Matrix (IOM-DTM)
- Issam Fares Public Policy Institute
- Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Design Research Centre
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
- Regenerate Lebanon
- Swiss Federal Office of Culture
- United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
- United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat)