Elisa Bayraktarov

Dr Elisa Bayraktarov is an ecologist with a background in environmental monitoring who mobilises and interrogates data to craft solutions for problems related to threatened species and marine coastal ecosystems. Elisa is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow with the The University of Queensland.

In her day job, Elisa is the Data & Science Manager at the global environmental non-governmental organisation, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in the Australian branch. She oversees the collection and management of data for conservation strategies and projects and is accountable for the accuracy and currency of data uploaded to TNC’s global online repository.

Before joining TNC, Elisa led two significant research and innovation programs: between 2020-2023, Elisa was the Digital Innovations Program Manager at Griffith University where she led an agile team of software engineers, data analysts, and scientists to build EcoCommons Australia – a cloud-based platform that empowers researchers with access to data and ecological modelling. Between 2016-2020, Elisa worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland where she co-led the development of Australia’s Threatened Species Index which since it’s release in 2018 has been used in government reporting on threatened species trends and has been established as one of the 50 official well-being indicators for Australia. Elisa has won multiple awards for her work at the interface between science innovation and technology, including the highly competitive, merit-based Women in Technology “Digital Mover and Shaker Award” in 2022.

Elisa has a PhD in coral reef ecology for monitoring Colombian Caribbean coral reefs, conferred by the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Ecology and the University of Bremen in Germany. Her postdoctoral research included syntheses, analyses, and interpreting scientific information to develop the first database on costs and feasibility of marine restoration projects. Elisa has an excellent record of peer reviewed publications consisting of 50+ scientific publications, an h-index of 22 and >2600 citations.