Paola Malanotte Rizzoli

Paola Malanotte Rizzoli is a physical oceanographer known for her research on ocean circulation and sea level rise, especially with respect to flooding conditions in Venice.

Education and career

As a child growing up in Venice, Malanotte Rizzoli had a passion for music and by age eleven learned La Traviata while considering a future as an opera singer.^[1] However, math prevailed and she earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Lyceum “Benedetti” Italy.^[2] In 1968 she completed a Ph.D. at the University of Padua with a dissertation titled “Quantum-mechanical structure of biologically important molecules. Investigation of the complex molecules of nucleic acids”.^[2] She spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow in Padua and then joined a study initiated by the Italian National Research Council to look at the issues surrounding Venice and the surrounding lagoon.^[3] Starting in 1971 she traveled between Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Venice working on oceanographic studies of Venice.^[3] Starting in 1972, she was also a research associate at Istituto Studio Dinamica Grande Masse (Institute for the Study of Great Masses), where she received tenure in 1976 and remained until 1981. In 1978 she completed a second Ph.D. at Scripps Institution of Oceanography with a dissertation titled “Solitary Rossby Waves Over Variable Relief and Their Stability Properties”.^[4][5][6] At the time, she was the only woman in the physical oceanography department.^[7] She remained at Scripps as a Cecil and Ida Green scholar from 1978 until 1980 at which point she moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),^[8] and again was the only woman in physical oceanography.^[7] In 1987, Malanotte Rizzoli became the first woman in MIT's Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences department to earn tenure.^[8] In 1994, Malanotte Rizzoli was one of 16 women faculty in the School of Science at MIT who drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) Robert Birgeneau, which started a campaign to highlight and challenge gender discrimination at MIT.^[9]

From 1997 until 2009, Malanotte Rizzoli led the MIT component of the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, and has been the main advisor for 22 students in the program.^[7]

Research

Malanotte Rizzoli has worked in multiple research topics, which she describes as her “renewal time” of 5–7 years.^[7] In 1982 she started a program focusing on the physical oceanography of the eastern Mediterranean, the POEM project, where she led research into the circulation of water in the region.^[10] As increasing amounts of data become available for oceanographic research, she has expanded her use of data assimilation,^[11] with a focus on its applications to oceanographic questions.^[12][13] Geographically, she has considered the formation of the rings of the Gulf Stream In the Atlantic Ocean^[14][15] and she has also worked on the exchange of heat, water, and salt in tropical oceans.^[16] In the early 2000s, Malanotte Rizzoli began work on climate science through a project that led to the development of a coupled ocean-atmosphere model in Southeast Asia where the Indonesian Throughflow allows passage of water from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.^[17] She was one of the contributing authors on the 2007 chapter on "Observations: Oceanic Climate Change and Sea Level" which was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.^[18]

Climate science, with its daunting complexity, is arguably the greatest challenge presently facing not only oceanography but the earth sciences in general

— Paola Malanotte Rizzoli, ^[7]

Malanotte Rizzoli grew up in Venice and remembers the 1966 Venice flood^[19] and in 2017 she considered how her connections to Venice influenced her career arc.^[7] The storm surge in Venice, the Acqua alta, has been the focus of her work and from 1995 until 2013, she was a consultant for Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the group tasked with the building the barriers designed to block the flow of water into the Venetian lagoon, the MOdulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (MOSE) project.^[20][7][21] In 2021, Malanotte-Rizzoli created an exhibit on the resilience of Venice with Laura Fregolent for the 17th International Venice Biennale of Architecture.^[22][23]

Selected publications

• Ghil, Michael; Malanotte-Rizzoli, Paola (1 January 1991). "Data Assimilation in Meteorology and Oceanography". Advances in Geophysics. 33: 141–266.
  ISSN 0065-2687
  .
• Malanotte-Rizzoli, Paola; Manca, Beniamino B; Ribera d'Alcala, Maurizio; Theocharis, Alexander; Brenner, Stephen; Budillon, Giorgio; Ozsoy, Emin (1 July 1999). "The Eastern Mediterranean in the 80s and in the 90s: the big transition in the intermediate and deep circulations". Dynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans. 29 (2–4): 365–395.
  ISSN 0377-0265
  .
• Malanotte-Rizzoli, Paola; Manca, Beniamino B.; D'Alcalà, Maurizio Ribera; Theocharis, Alexander; Bergamasco, Andrea; Bregant, Davide; Budillon, Giorgio; Civitarese, Giuseppe; Georgopoulos, Dimitris; Michelato, Antonio; Sansone, Emilio; Scarazzato, Paolo; Souvermezoglou, Ekaterini (January 1997). "A synthesis of the Ionian Sea hydrography, circulation and water mass pathways during POEM-Phase I". Progress in Oceanography. 39 (3): 153–204.
  doi:10.1016/S0079-6611(97)00013-X
  .
• Malanotte-Rizzoli, Paola (2017-01-03). "Venice and I: How a City Can Determine the Fate of a Career". Annual Review of Marine Science. 9 (1): 1–29.
  PMID 27575741
  .
• Urban, Edward R.; Sundby, Bjorn; Malanotte-Rizzoli, Paola; Melillo, Jerry M. (2009). Watersheds, bays, and bounded seas : the science and management of semi-enclosed marine systems. Washington: Island Press.
  ISBN 9781597265034
  .

• Masi Prize, Masi Foundation (1998)[24]
• Fellow, American Meteorological Society (2002)^[25]
• Fellow, American Geophysical Union (2006)^[26]
• Rachel Carson lecture, American Geophysical Union (2017)^[27]
• Enrico Marchi lecture, University of Catania (2018)^[28]

Personal life

Malanotte-Rizzoli is married to Peter Stone who is also a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2021 they endowed the Peter H. Stone and Paola Malanotte Stone chair whose first recipient is Arlene Fiore.^[8]

References