Giulia is a community ecologist, interested in understanding the interplay between the resource use of individual organisms and the dynamics of their populations and communities. She is also interested in understanding how community responses to environmental change are mediated by changes in the energy use of organisms.

She approaches these questions using marine communities of invertebrates and algae as model systems. Her research involves experimental manipulations of populations and communities and physiological assays to investigate the interactions between the size of organisms, their densities and energy use.