After earning his B.S. with honors in biology, geology and music from Brooklyn College, he studied the ecology of blue crabs in the Caribbean for his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California and his Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Iowa.  

Since 1978 he has focused on environmental policy at the US Environmental Protection Agency, White House Council on Environmental Quality, Ecological Society of America, The Wilderness Society and Ocean Conservancy before founding MCBI in 1996.

MCBI is a science and conservation advocacy organization focusing on ecosystem-based marine spatial management. Elliott´s 150+ publications include Conserving Biological Diversity in Our National Forests (1986), Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest (1990), Global Marine Biological Diversity: A Strategy for Building Conservation into Decision Making (1993) and Marine Conservation Biology: The Science of Maintaining the Sea´s Biodiversity (2005).

His EBM publications include and “Essential ecological insights for marine ecosystem-based management and marine spatial planning" in Marine Policy in (2008), “Resolving mismatches in U.S. ocean governance" in Science (2006) and book chapters including “Place-based ecosystem management in the open ocean (2005) and “Ending the range wars on the last frontier: Zoning the sea" (2005).

He is a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation and winner of the Nancy Foster Award for Habitat Conservation from the US National Marine Fisheries Service.