Elisa Petranich works at the Department of Mathematics, Informatics, and Geosciences (MIGe) as a laboratory technician of TREELab - TRace Elements in the Environment Laboratory– an interdepartmental laboratory of the University of Trieste in cooperation among MIGe, the Department of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences (DSCF) and the Department of Medical, Surgery and Health (DSM).
In March 2012, she earned a master's degree in Environmental Biology (110/110 with honors) from the University of Trieste and, in 2018, a PhD in "Environment and Life" (XXX Cycle) on the “Biogeochemical cycle of mercury in a lagoon environment modified by fish farming (Grado Lagoon)”. Her work, in support of teaching and research, focuses on the geochemical analyses of organic (e.g. hair, mollusks, fish) and inorganic (e.g. sediments, soils, freshwaters and saltwater) environmental matrices, with specific reference to the analysis of heavy metals, particularly mercury, using different analytical techniques: atomic absorption spectrophotometry (AAS), atomic fluorescence spectrophotometry (AFS), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), ion chromatography (ICH), inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), and inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-OES).