Tosca Ballerini received a MS degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Florence and a PhD in Polar Biology at the University of Siena in Italy. For her PhD Tosca developed demographic models to describe the population dynamics of the Adélie penguin population of Edmonson Point, in central Ross Sea, Antarctica.

Since November 2008 she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography with Prof. Eileen Hofmann. She works in the synthesis phases of the US-GLOBEC program, developing mathematical models for Southern Ocean food webs.