Giuliano Elia obtained his PhD in chemistry at the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1979 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow and later as a Research Scientist at the Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Rome until 1999. He moved then to Switzerland, where he spent one year as a visiting scientist at Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, where he collaborated with Prof. Max M. Burger, Director of the Institute. Later he moved to ETH in Zurich, where he remained until 2006 as Group Leader of the Proteomic Unit of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences. During the stay at ETH Zurich, Dr. Elia also obtained his Habilitation to Privatdozent at the Department of Chemistry and Applied  Biosciences.
Since Oct. 2006, Dr. Elia is Director of the UCD Conway Institute Mass Spectrometry Resource and from 2009, Coordinator of Post-graduate Education of the same institute.

Dr. Elia's research focuses on the discovery by mass spectrometry-based proteomic approaches of novel targets for ligand-based targeting of angiogenesis in solid tumors and other angiogenesis-related pathologies. In collaboration with Prof. Dario Neri, Dr. Elia published the first ex-vivo proteomic analysis of human kidney tumor tissues. Dr. Elia's expertise is mainly in mass spectrometric techniques for proteomic applications, but also in the use of antibody phage-display libraries for facile isolation of binders towards recombinantly expressed protein and synthetic peptides. He is also a collaborator on a number of multi-million Euro collaborative research efforts, funded by Science Foundation Ireland or various EU grants.

Dr. Elia is co-author of 70 papers on peer-reviewed international journals and co-inventor of 4 patents. At ETH and in UCD, he has so far supervised the work of six PhD students and of a number of undergraduate students.